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DivX DVD Players Arrive
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.
Will the firmware be flashable to update to the latest codecs? I'm sure many have spent time wondering why their movies didn't work before learning that a new DivX codec was released and the newer videos are being encoded with it.
Does anyone know what the expected disc layout is?
Does it pick up any AVI files in the root directory and play them or is there a well defined structure/index file? How are multiple languages, subtitles and menus handled? This info is necessary for standardisation on a uniform DiVX disc format.
Krishna
--- I'd love to go out with you, but I have to study for a Turing test.
As many people have pointed out, the codec is frequently updated. Therefore, many of the to-be-released videos will not play on DVD players that you buy today.
So why not create a new standard, analogous to the VideoCD format, that incorporates the codec algorithm into the disc headers? Thus all that we need is a universal decoder that will look for the codec in the first sectors of the disc.
+=o [b]RoboNerd[/b] o=+
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Go to www.doom9.org and have a look. You need the Ogg Vorbis DirectShow filters to play them and OggMUX to make them. Take DivX video in an AVI files, Vorbis audio in an OGG file and mux them together to produce an OGM container with both. You can even put subtitles in it if you want. Plays great on any Windows system with the OggDS
filters installed.
Oh, and VBR audio work just fine in it. The video is VBR, why not the audio?
I think it's really cool what they're doing with "set-top boxes" (is that he right term). I mean, a stereo unit that plays mp3s from a hard drive, or CD, or even from the network (I own an AudioTron). And these things are going to be REALLY cool ... but exactly who would own them? The people that have DivX files to play on them aren't going to be paying money for hardware to play them. They already have a computer that plays them, and probably an easy way of connecting it to their television set. Mp3 players for stereo units have a bigger market because there simply are more people who can use them.
In addition to that, there are so many non-standards that are changing so fast that I prefer to just build a good computer to sit in the stereo cabinate and use a wireless keyboard and mouse at the couch. With S-Video and optical audio outputs, I don't really need to worry about secondary hardware because my computer does everything I need. With a network connection to a file server, the geek world needs nothing more.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Only if content producers choose to encode their products with DRM technologies. I don't think many people ripping DVDs for the net would do that, do you?
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
You are correct that newer 3d accelerators like the GeForce 4 and Radeon 9700 are programmable to a degree, but it is a very limited amount of programmability. Basically you can write simple programs that morph the vertexes in a scene and that describe textures ina mathematical sense. That's about it. Still purely graphcs and not general purpose.
Also note that it is only receantly, within the last year or two, that consumer level graphics cards have gained even this level of programmability. They are finally starting to get a little less specialised and more general purpose, but still are highly, highly specalised devices.
I predict that we will someday see a crossover, when general purpose CPUs become so powerful and cheap that DSPs will be bsolete. A cheap CPU will be capable of doing anything out could want, and hence there is no reason for a specalised circut.
However, for now, DSPs are still very common in many devices, and I'd bet this is no exception. While you are correct that a $500 PC could to what they are talking about, that is WAAAY too expensive. I'm betting they are shooting for $300 or less.