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.

Comments

This is useless.

[Krapangor]

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.

it's flash-able !

[heymjo]

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" ...

Too little - too late.

[tcdk]

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!).

Not the first

[LiENUS]

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

Re:Doh.. no xvid?

[cioxx]

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. ;)

Re:you know it's gonna happen

[TobyWong]

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.

So many technical flaws..

[Junta]

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....

Is GMC and QPEL that hard in hardware?

[Kjella]

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