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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.
A average TV-Set has a dot matrix with 0.12 inches dot distance. That means that it has a very bad resolution. It's one of the reasons why you should watch TV only from a larger distance 2 meters or so (the other is of course gamma radiation). However this implies that you really can't see the very little details. But the point about DivX compression is in fact these details. All older compression schemes used to delete these due to lossy compression.
So, a DivX player with a normal TV set is useless. You should connect it either to your computer screen or get one of these new plasma or LCD TV-sets.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
the fact that this thing is firmware-updateable makes it extra cool (and warrants it a lifespan of longer than 1y). It does all the common formats + divX , yay !! Now if only someone could tell me why they named this thing "Kiss" ...
It looks a bit better than an xbox, but other than that it does nothing that an xbox with xbmp can't do cheaper.
My modded xbox with an 120gb hard drive and xbmp has played everything that I've thrown at it (movie wise), including old divx formats that this thing can't handle. Cheaper (Getting MS to subsidize your hardware helps, thanks Bill!).
TC - My Photos..
this isnt the first player that could play divx movies on the tv
its the first player that supports full resolution the sega dreamcast played divx just fine at 320x240 resolution
even played 3.xx and xvid
http://www.dcdivx.com
xVid simply surpasses any DivX codec out there. Small size, superior quality, Open Source, the works.
;)
OT: For those of you unfamiliar with xVid codec, have a look.
"If it isn't region free, then it's worthless"
You raise an interesting point; one which made me think, and this is what I came up with: Region coding can be handled in two places: the hardware, and the firmware. The firmware of the player can be updated/hacked, just like all my standalone DVD players, so I can play the DVD's I FARKING BOUGHT IN JAPAN you MPAA Frafgd$##%#$% anyways... And since the hardware (the DVD drive) is just a PC DVD drive, you can connect that to your computer and update that as well, if neccesary.
My two bits on XVID: The whole DiVX frimfram is complex enough for the average user. Thanks to XViD for introducing another codec that to this day, while not groundbreaking, let alone neccesary, is making the video codec situation tricky to deal with.
They won't like it for sure but it would be hard to make a case that a compression algorithm is inheirently evil. Most likely they will just launch a series of groundless lawsuits against this small company and run them out of money.
- Toby
With this review, hard to take them seriously. First they say that it is restricted to PAL or NTSC, and that PAL is 720x576 *dpi*. dpi means dots per inch, drop it because it is wrong, unless you have a 1-cubic-inch pal screen, and the i means 'cubic inch'.....
Then, correctly notes that 1280x720 and 1920x1080 are supported, but the phrasing seems to suggest that it is being scaled to PAL or NTSC, which is wrong. This is a progressive-scan device, and those are HDTV resolutions. They have already on the second page made a *huge* mistake about a fundamental function of the player.
And of course I love that the DVD-ROM is connected via a DIE cable... he he... I know, a simple typo, but one with amusing connotations.
On the subject of the player itself... I'm not so sure it will hit it off with the target audience. Most home users don't care that much about DivX, because making them is very difficult and downloading is hard because it requires too much bandwidth, servers don't give away enough hosting space for movies, and the places where DivX movies can be downloaded are rather intimidating to common users (i.e. IRC). People who do work with such formats frequently are aware of the nature of the media that makes them think twice about dedicated hardware purchases. The formats themselves sometimes change in incompatible ways, and also a format's dominance in tenuous at best. Most are also technical enough to realize that for not much more money they can piece together a decent PC with TV out for not much more that will have faster, general purpose processors that can adapt easy to new formats and new delivery mechanisms. This thing only takes Discs, but many people would prefer to use SMB or NFS... If anything changes, a computer is easy to reconfigure, a set-top box... no....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You gotta wonder, because even for their next-gen, HDTV-capable chips, it still says:
MPEG-1, MPEG-2 MP@HL and MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile Level 5* video decoding. * without support global motion compensation (GMC)
Sounds really silly to me to not fully supporting the standard... they're like _this_ close, and you know that many users will have problems with the rips they have *cough* obtained *cough*, because it has the wrong encoding settings. Fair enough that there are other formats on the horizon (mpeg4 AVC, wm10+, realcrap) but GMC is here today, and the mpeg4 ASP profile isn't exactly brand new. Is it that hard to support? Or is there some other reason?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The embedded CPU in the EM8500 chip is a 150 MHz ARM V4 CPU without MMU. The kernel is name linux-2.4.17-uc0. uc is probably for ucLinux.
:
:
uclinux is a modified Linux Kernel for CPU without MMU
http://www.uclinux.org/
You can also find busybox in the bin directory, a light implementation of a lot of shell utilities
http://www.busybox.net/
bin/init, mpegplayer and fileplayer seems to be entirely specific to kiss (and probably closed source).
Look at the pictures of the latest Kiss DP-500, similar to DP-450 but with 10/100 Ethernet
http://dtouton.free.fr/DP500/DP500arriere1.jpg
h
"What are you talking about? DivX, XviD and ffmpeg are all creating MPEG-4 spec-compliant video streams. As far as the decoder can see, streams created by any of them were created by the same encoder."
So, honestly wondering, why can't it play DivX 3.x format? Many of my discs are in 3.x, and if there's a way to make them playable on this player, that would be fantastic. Are there any tools that cleanly seperate the MPEG-4 stream from an AVI, which ostensibly should work for all DivXs, including 3.x? Of course, one can convert an AVI to mpeg-4, but that involves dirty decomp-recomp, and that's the LAST ditch option. Anybody?