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PS2 Gets A Working Divx Player

Posted by Hemos on from the no-sorenson-yet dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, the PS2reality team released the first working Divx player for the Playstation 2. Site is in spanish, so try using babel for translation. Works with Divx 3 and up. You can also swap your avi cd-roms if you have a modchip or you can use the other various swap techniques out there for the PS2. Divx player does require some way of booting the homebrew program, either no-swap modchip or modchip+bootdisc( e.g swap magic, gameshark, etc.) would work."

8 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Get this by Apreche · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you want to watch DivX's on your TV, get a video card with S-Video out. It's a lot easier to plug that into the video in on your television and put another cable from your sound card to your reciever than it is to mod a PS2.
    And video cards are cheap. Just stick it in a PCI slot and set it as a second display. It's the cheapest solution.

    I'll be impressed when somebody has a portable DivX players so I can watch TV episodes on the go.

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    1. Re:Get this by mrob2002 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The Sharp Zaurus plus tkcVideo lets me watch DivX on the go. A 25 minute TV show compresses down to about 50 Mbytes, so I can fit two episodes onto a 128M Compact Flash card. Pretty watchable too on long boring train journeys.

  2. Re:WOW by droopus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yep, been using it for months and it's great. I've posted about it at least seven times and I tried submitting stories about Qcast twice: once in early September, once a month later, but they were rejected.

    I have only two even slightly negative comments about Qcast: it won't play any movie in a nonstandard resolution (they are working on it) and since there are no VCR-like controls (FF/RW/Scan) you have to be REAL careful with the controller. My wife and I were watching a movie Saturday and my little girl came in and tripped over the controller. Bam! Back to the beginning, and no way to advance to the point where you were watching. That's my only real complaint, and a simple "are you sure?" dialog would fix that.

    Other than that, it absolutely works as advertised. I have it installed on 2 PS2s, one at the TV and one at the stereo (both looking at the same machine in my office.) Streams pretty much anything you throw at it, cleanly, glitch-free and with an easy to use UI.

    Buy it, it's well worth the cash.

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  3. Re:Linux kit by XMunkki · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As I don't have a PS2 with a modchip, I can't verify this, but I have heard from many instances that if your PS2 can read CD-R:s, so does the Linux. Of course this means that you already must have a PS2 with the necessary mods and thus could use the homebrewn divx player. Advantages with the Linux version are clear. Some people (like me) keep all their divx movies in a separate network server. Plus it's easier to develop for Linux (own patches, frontends, GUIs, filters etc.)

    Also I'm sure on the status of the USB CD-ROM support, but I guess it may be possible to plug in an external CD drive which you can use freely.

  4. the thing I don't like about qcast is... by truffle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It requires you install software on your host computer.

    Why can't qcast mount a remote samba partition or win32 partition? Simplify the life of your customers, please....

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  5. QCast? by gilesjuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The QCast guys couldn't be bothered to make a CD filesystem so they stream the DIVX files from a PC. Ugly solution and it's commercial software. PS2Reality's player reads from any CD, is small enough to be included on the CD and works great with DIVX+MP3 audio AVIs. It's also free. Proof that commercial software isn't always better.

    1. Re:QCast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's a bunch of crap.

      Broadq/qcast is designed to be used on any PS2 (with a Sony NIC). The homebrew player only works with mod PS2's -- that's why it can read data off of CD-- but only specially formatted data!!!

      If you look at the homebrew docs, there are a lot of restrictions on how the CD's have to be formatted if you're using a swap method. If you want to use the swap method, you have to make special CD's for use by the system using the CDGEN app, and include a copy of the PS2DivX player on the CD.

      If you want to separate out your avi files on a different CD, you need a no-swap modchip. Again, this needs to be made using the special CDGEN application.

      Qcast is much easier than this, and it's commercial because they have to press CDs!

  6. DivX hardware; ok, What version? by lander_es · · Score: 2, Interesting

    VCD, SVCD, DVD; ok, Mpeg2 compresion... Mp3; ok, Mpeg layer 3 compresion... but DivX, How many version of DivX are now? Too fast changes for hardware descompresion...