PS2 Gets A Working Divx Player

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."

Comments

Or....

[GeorgeH]

If you don't want to deal with modchips and swapping you can get a Qcast for $50 (thinkgeek sells 'em too) and play MP3, OGG, MPEG and DivX files streamed from a Windows, Mac OS X or Linux system over the network.

Re:Or....

[Mysticalfruit]

I went out and bought a copy of Qcast a couple of months ago and I like it. It works as adverstised. The only issue I've had is that you have to be very particular in how you encode the divx stuff, otherwise it scarf at the files.

XBox

[NetJunkie]

The XBox media player does most media including DIVX, SVCD, VCD, mp3, etc. The next version due any time has a great interface and even better media support. It would be a great system to make an XBox a good media server.

Steps to Success

[ekrout]

1) Spend several years researching Sony's Playstation 2 entertainment console
2) Enlist a few smart friends to help you build a mod chip that allows Divx movies to be decoded
3) Get some recognition for your hack by posting a story to the most popular geek news site in the world
4) Get phone call from Sony's lawyers
5) Get phone call from Web host's sysadmin
6) Learn that you're the defendant in a billion dollar lawsuit
7) Learn that your Web server's disk died, bringing all of your research from the past couple of years down with it
8) Shoot self.

Hmmm

[jbmoll]

Well if we all have computers why go buy a ps2 and try and modifiy it when you can watch it on the computer. Seems like a risky way to blow up your ps2.

Re:Hmmm

[Lebannen]

On the other hand, location matters as well.

Personally, I live in a bedsit-type thing, so my living-room is also my computer room; easy to watch computery stuff from my sofa.

However, in your average house [hahaha], the computer tends to be in a different room from the sofa, sound system, and/or TV. Whereas the PS2 will be in the right spot. I know several people who have an old PC hidden in their living room for DVDs and divxs... but if there's a playstation 2 there, seems a lot less hassle to just install something nice like this.

Re:Hmmm

[droopus]

Because, other than geeks....people do not consume media in an unfamiliar paradigm. They want tunes in their car, their portable device or their stereo.

They want movies on their TV. Qcast allows both of these. I have a Cinema Display and I won't even watch a movie on that. Rather than lying on my couch looking at a 61" Toshiba? No contest.

As for "blowing up your PS2" using Qcast puts far less strain on the graphics chips in the PS2 than GTA: it merely becomes an interface device. IMO, Qcast (and Roomlink, eventually) are the PS2's killer apps.

Get this

[Apreche]

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.

Re:Get this

[91degrees]

I am not lugging my PC downstairs just to watch a movie thanks.

That said, it would probably be less hassle all round to buy a DVD player with VCD capability and reencode the DivXs to VCD.

Re:Get this

[mrob2002]

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.

Re:Get this

[SmallFurryCreature]

mmm, ain't these things called laptops? Seriously I had a dell something or other for sometime and a long commute time. So I watched anime fansubs in the train. Worked perfectly except I kept burning my penis :p

Oh and for those posters who want to watch in their living room and ain't allowed to put their computer there, laptops come with tv-outs nowadays. Granted picture quality may suck.

Isn't including DivX support in hardware a bit tricky? Not only do they keep changing but isn't the legal state a bit to unclear for a hardware company to mess around with? Sure they have to pay a royalty for DVD but that is simple. Sign the check and you are in the clear.

Linux kit

[mtthws]

I know the linux kit for the ps2 has been out for a while, so I was wondering if anyone knows of any divx players for linux that have been ported to the ps2 yet? It seems like it would be a lot nicer to just boot it linux then watch your movie from mplayer instead of having to mod you ps2 and keep changing cds just to watch a divx movie.

Not the intended use...

[PjotrP]

So clearly this should not even be on slashdot. Surely this way of using something that is designed to play ps2 games and dvd's to do something else is illegal! Sony might wanna bring a hardware divx player on the market in a later stage. By violating the PS2 in such a way you are effectively stealing money from them which you might have paid for their divx player when it will be released. I hope slashdot will quickly remove this newsitem and stops supporting theft!

Some English

[ReadParse]

Funny that it's all in spanish except "Make a Donation" :)

Re:WOW

[droopus]

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.

Come on...

[pctainto]

I mean, PS2 has all the hardware to be able to play divx files, so, it seems that making the mod chip would be hard, but not exceptionally hard. People should instead focus on getting divx players to run on PSX or Nintendo 64 (buy cartridge divxs, heh). Come on, make it harder and less usable, like the people that modify C64s...

From the webpage

[Espectr0]

Debido a la gran cantidad de visitantes que ha recibido la web sobre las 18:00 horas, el servidor se ha venido abajo sin permitirnos tan siquiera, dar un enlace de descarga del reproductor. Hasta hace escasos minutos no hemos podido volver a acceder a la web, lo que nos ha obligado a empezar a distribuir el reproductor por otros canales.

Translation: thanks to those sob's from slashdot, now we cannot release our player due to severe slashdotting. Those goats! ;)

Bridging Cultures...

[Slackrat]

Debido a la gran cantidad de visitantes que ha recibido la web sobre las 18:00 horas, el servidor se ha venido abajo sin permitirnos tan siquiera, dar un enlace de descarga del reproductor.

Universal in any language: we've been Slashdotted.

the thing I don't like about qcast is...

[truffle]

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....

QCast?

[gilesjuk]

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.

Mirrors for downloading the player

[Tensor]

These are the places to download the player:

PS2Newz.net
PS2Ownz.com
elotrolado.net
crackmanworld.com
indicedivx.com
bandaancha.st