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DivX DVD Players Arrive

Posted by timothy on from the what-no-ogg dept.

division21 writes "Geeks rejoice -- DivX Enabled DVD Players finally surface! (With all the goodies: MP3, SVCD, etc.) I remember when MP3 compatability appeared back in the day -- And it looks as though DivX Compatibility could be a real possibility for the mainstream ..." And if you can live without the compression, cherrypi points out this surprisingly favorable review of perhaps the cheapest (under $200) portable DVD player with a built-in screen.

8 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. If you have an XBox... by NetJunkie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Get a modchip and install the XBox Media Player. It'll stream DiVX/AVI/MPEG/SVCD/VCD from a PC (or off the internal HD) and display on your TV.

    Very nice.

    1. Re:If you have an XBox... by Rew190 · · Score: 5, Informative
      An even easier way to do that is to get a video card that supports tv-out. Nvidia's NView works great for me (I believe that's a pretty standard feature on the new GeForce cards), and if you have a soundcard with a digital coax out cable, you can plug that right into your receiver. I use a WinXP box for this though, so I'm not sure how driver support is on Linux.


      Stupid simple, but divx movies look great on my 27 inch TV. If your computer's near your home entertainment setup, I highly recommend looking into getting the two hooked up.

    2. Re:If you have an XBox... by olrs · · Score: 4, Informative
      I would suggest not doing this until the makers of the XBox Media Player have settled the following issue from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/:
      Some win32 guys made a media player for Micro$oft's well-known "console", the X-box. Unfortunately they used FFMPEG and XVID sources in their closed-source product, and failed to make their sources - and changes to the used GPL codebase - available either in public, or by request - as the GPL license forces them to do so. They can't be contacted because they don't publish their E-Mail addresses due to an expectable threat from M$, or whatever their reasons are. This violates GPL. As we currently cannot move against them (not that we want to do so, in the first place), we can only warn the open-source community to STAY AWAY FROM THIS PIECE OF PIRATED SOFTWARE! It's a pity that so much people don't give a shit about the tireless work of FFMPEG/XVID creators.

      Just my two cents.
  2. Re:And if they support DivX by octalc0de · · Score: 4, Informative

    Many will also end up supporting Ogg Vorbis, since it's become a popular audio encoding format for DivX's. (Or so I hope.)

    Ogg Vorbis isn't really supposed to be used for DivXs. It's a VBR system, when AVIs require a CBR audio compressor, otherwise the video gets really screwed up. Now if there was a way to get ogg to do CBR....

  3. Re:And if they support DivX by puppetman · · Score: 4, Informative

    You better tell all the encoders that. Most new movies are encoded with ogg, and have a .ogm extension. Lower bitrates, better sound, and more room left on the CD(s) to increase your video bitrate.

  4. Probably not by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    IT kind of depends on how it does the decoding. If it just has a general purpose CPU that is fast enough to handle all the decoing, like a Power PC 750 or something, then it is possable that this could be done since all teh decoding would be software based.

    However I think it is far more likely that this device uses hardware dedicated to the sole purpose of decoing video/audio. Basically the MPEG 2/4 decoding is probably done by a DSP dedicated to that purpose. Well that means that the chip can't do anything but MPEG 2/4 decoding, and cannot be changed.

    It's kinda like a 3d graphics card in your PC. Any modern 3d card is much, much, much faster than any processor you can find. The GeForce 4 can pull around 1 trillon opertaions per second when it really gets cranked up. However, it is a specific DSP, all it does it push pixels, and it can't be reprogrammed to do anything else. Your CPU, while much slower, is general purpose and can be programmed to do theoritically anything.

    Now I don't know for sure what this thing uses, I was unable to access the information on their site, but I suspect it is a couple of dedicated chips to do decoding, not a CPU. In that case, it woul not be updatable. I could be wrong though, CPUs are cheap enough these days in theory they could have a moderatly powerful one (probably on the order of an 900mhz P3 or so) and then just do the decoding in software.

  5. DivX 3.11 Support by Cyberllama · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall when divx first came out and people said there would NEVER be a commercially available stand-alone divx player becuase divx 3 was cobbled together from bits of microsoft code and thus violated their copyrights. Since then it became an open source project and has been rewritten from scracth. Hence, although versions 4 and 5 would be legal, a divx 3 decoding player would not be.

  6. General purpose DSP's abound by xtal · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have a look at the DSP Village over on the Texas Instruments web site. There are whole families of DSP chips that are reprogrammable and accellerate media functionality in all sorts of ways. Even your example of the GF4 - it is specialized towards 3D accelleration, it is customizable with the Cg language extensions. I won't even get into crazier ideas like shipping a FPGA and putting the algorithms on it (the general purpose CPU is probably cheaper). This is the case today, but maybe not tomorrow. This device probably does use some crummy chipset, you're right.

    What people should be asking is why the hell the folks at ATI - who already make exactly what you want, by the way, with their all in wonder cards - can't get their act together and write some decent, bulletproof software for windows 2k or linux (I don't really care at this point, if it's solid software). A general purpose PC with more power than you could ever need for this is about $500 away. Just add the card (maybe with some goodies like support for HDTV) and you're off to the races. Or just get a projector.

    The problem with that right now is stability. That ATI software is not very stable or good, doesn't integrate DiVX and scheduling functionality, doesn't want to work with my satellite reciever, etc. Get some good software in there and you have something.

    My $0.02.

    --
    ..don't panic