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Tom's Hardware Reviews First Player for DivX Video
Idimmu Xul writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the DP-450: the first player for DivX video in Hi-Fi format! Until now, movies in space-saving DivX (MPEG-4) format could only be viewed on a PC. The KiSS DVD player is the first standalone device for TVs and projectors." Very cool, although it will render my stacks of VCDs obsolete.
This is a step forward for DivX. I don't think most normal people know much about DivX though - perhaps this will help. Did any of you know there's even a DivX dev kit for the GameCube?
This page has a huge database of players and tells you how well they play VCD, SVCD, XSVCD, DVD-R, etc. I used it recently to make sure my new Panasonic could player SVCD's.
It also supports ogg/vorbis files. Ogg Traffic
From what I hear, it doesn't work quite as well as one could hope. First of all, it doesn't support DivX3.11 so all those illegal DVD-rips won't play on it. Second: It doesn't support MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, so if you encoded your video with Quarter Pixel Motion Estimation or Global Motion Compensation it won't play. And finally, I've heard reports that it doesn't work on MPEG-4 compliant videos encoded with XviD, so I'd say that it is pretty much a piece of crap. And don't forget that its MPEG-4 decoding chip was made by Sigma Designs. The very same company that stole code from XviD. I won't EVER buy anything made by those thieving bastards. And my last gripe: If it isn't region free, then it's worthless.
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Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
While true in and of itself, this is not at all the same thing as the DivX video compression codec that enterprising people are using to store their videos now.
Some folks are kind enough to help us see that distinction by refering to it at DivX ;-) You can grab the codec over at http://www.divx-digest.com/software/divxcodec.htm l if you want to take it for a test drive.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
Keep it Simple, Stupid. A reminder to yourself that what you're building, designing, etc. should be simple and not unnecessarily complex.
It's probably as old as FUBAR.
Just think, when our grandkids are psychic-text messenging each other with "OMG STFU FAG", we'll get to explain it to them.
It supports all real MPEG-4 Codecs as long as they only use Advanced Simple Profile functions. As long as your XVID Video doesn't use QPel motion compensation or global motion compensation your xvid file will work. (You also can't use these features in DivX 5.0 files if you want to play them on this player.)
Jan
First of all, this DVD/DivX player runs Linux kernel 2.4.17.
If you did not believe me, download the ISO containing the firmware upgrade on the Kiss site
http://www.kiss-technology.com/support/DRIVERS/45
Unzip it, mount the ISO, retrieve the romfs.bin file, mount it and check it's content
zcat linux.bin.gz | strings | grep Linux
Linux version 2.4.17-uc0 (kiss@localhost.localdomain) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)) #1 Wed Jan 22 15:30:35 CET 2003
This player works perfectly with any MPEG-4 file. Mencoder (part of MPlayer) with libavcodec creates files compatible with the DP-450.
The image quality when playing a DivX (on a Sony 32" 16/9 TV) is FAR superior to the quality of the same file played on a PC hooked to the TV. (I made some comparisons with my Linux PC + NVidia GF4200, S-Video + MPlayer and a friends PC running Windoz + WMP + ATI Radeon card + S-Video link)
I know there is the 3.11 issue but it's really simple to convert films to MPEG4 to make them compatible with the Kiss player.
I'll differ with you on this...
With *the same data rates* the divx encoding will provide better video. It's a more efficient compression scheme which allows *more* detail to be encoded.
The issue is that many people encode at abismal data rates so the quality is bad. The file size is 1/2 of the MPEG2 but the quality is worse. Given the same file size in MPEG2 or DIVX and the DIVX will look better.
-Dubya