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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.
something tells me that the bighead in the entertainment industry are not gonna like this. They alredy claim that divx piracy is killing them as it is, and now there is an option for those not into computers. I also have to wonder what they are gonna do about it. If they can make it illegal to post information that would allow one to crack ceratin securities, could they ban a set-top divx player?
YOU SUCK BALLS!
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 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 ^_^
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..
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.