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First Certified DivX/DVD Player Released
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article, a company named KiSS Technology announced at CeBit that they are releasing the first certified DivX DVD players, the DP-450 and DP-500! They are supposed to be able to playback ALL versions of DivX content and digital rights management. I'm completely stoked on this, I would buy one of these in a snap. This could make the purchase of dvd burners slow down in my opinion." (And Yes, it plays Ogg Vorbis, too.) Ebay imports, anyone?
No, you need a DVD reader to make the DivX, not a DVD burner. DivX files don't have to be on a DVD, they can be on a CDR(W).
Company homepage is here.
One of my collegaues have actually ordered one. It is based on an arm processor running uLinux & IIRC you can actually flash the firmware youself, and it is running some sort of mplayer. (AFAIK, the software is somewhere to be found on their homepage.
The FAQ is
here.
And, a homepage for kissdvd (the player?) - you need flash. So, that will probably survive a looong time...
Mads Bondo Dydensborg
Slashdot article refering to this review
Yes, this article minus the "We're releasing it now" was posted on /. a while ago.
I don't know too much about this specific player, but I bought my first DVD player from KiSS about three years ago - a cheap player, around $200, which also played mp3s, vcd and svcd. And it is probably the worst DVD player I have ever used.
The DVD image and audio quality was very, very bad (jerky playback, unclear image, lots of jitter etc), and it wouldn't even play half of the VCDs I tried. It also had a very "plastic" feel to it, and I suspect it used a standard IDE DVD ROM with some very cheap chips for playback.
This new player may be good, but after my experiences with their earlier products I would approach this one with caution.
(Just a little clarification/correction)
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FWIW, they are absolutely not the first to produce these. Several companies has been OEM'ing these in China using the same Sigma 8500 decoder for months. Some answers to questions: 1. It it firmware upgradeable? Yes. 2. Region Codes? These units are 'all code' out of the box. Is this illegal? 'Kindof' 3. Can it play a DVD full of mp3's. divx movies etc? Yes. 4. Why this and not some crap from Walmart? Well, this is progressive scan, for one thing. (In built in the Sigma) 5. Can I send you one? No :)
KiSS Technology DP-450 and DP-500. There are even efforts underway to dezone the 450 and 500.
Recent DivX versions are getting closer to SVCD quality. Sadly, not quite there yet. As for why?
Hmm.. 1 cd for almost any decent DivX rip. 2, 3, and even 4 cds for even the shortest movie encoded using SVCD. Not only do you save on cds (and the associated storage space), but you don't have to change discs midway into a movie (several times in some cases). Sucks if you don't have a changer, I'd imagine.
Oh, and as for every DVD player playing VCD/SVCD.. those claims are way overstated. AFAIK no Toshiba player handles SVCD. Many Panasonic models can't handle it either. I won't even go into the low end stuff like Samsung...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Really? I can't say that I've seen too many people wanting a DVD burner to pirate DVD's. The things are so cheap (the DVD's, not the burners) that when you take into account the time it takes to rip the thing, well it's like that wise old saying, 'Linux is cheap if your time is worth nothing'.
Basically, the DP-450 it is a VCR-sized box with a 150Mhz StrongARM running Linux 2.4.x + busybox + custom software + custom hardware helping MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding + a (Toshiba?) DVD drive + remote control. No ethernet on the DP-450 (but it is there on the DP-500). No fans :-)
Just insert a CD/DVD and it starts playing what's on it (but press the load button: just pushing the loading bay is not enough):
Briefly said: this is an MPEG2 and MPEG4 player (hence DivX 4 and 5; old DivX 3 is out of question), and as of now just MPEG4 Simple Profile features are supported (thus it won't play everything out there, as of now: be warned).
Image quality is nice, but not excellent (blacks aren't so... black). Firmware upgrades on the DP-450 are performed by downlowading an iso image (of a couple of megabytes) from the manifacturer website, and then booting the player with it.
All in all, a nice piece of hardware, easy to use, somewhat expensive (I purchased mine for 400 Euros). But it sits there beside your TV set and it just works.
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You can find stamped VCDs at AllVCD.com...almost all of them are imports, but they are suprisingly cheaper than VHS releases, plus tend to be released earlier. Best of all, they have the STAR WARS trilogy (who says you can't get it in digital format?).
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It took a couple of weeks for it to arrive, but it finally got to me.
.iso that is used to update the firmware.
First thing I did was to make it regionless - Region free Kiss DVD
Next, due to lack of the software CD, I had a hard time working out how to get the ethernet port to work - luckily, a nice person on Kiss DVD forum pointed out to me that the software was also on the same
Once software was installed, and the IP of my windows machine entered into the Kiss DVD setup, I was able to play all of my files that were Divx4,5, Xvid, mp3 etc.
It requires a windows machine to stream the data through, but if you can share a drive to it eg, samba, then you can share from non-windows platforms.
In fact, it plays them better than on my PC (Athlon 1600, 1G DDR, GF4-Ti4200).
So far, the promised Divx3.11 support is not yet with us, but indications are it will be with us in a few weeks. Once it has, it will make the noisy computer beside my TV redundant!
While I do recommend this to the people who need to be on the leading edge, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't have a CDburner - though who would buy a Divx player who didn't?? -due to the need for frequent firmware updates.
This is not new, you have been able to buy them for a while. And in Denmark the copyright holders of movies are examining wether or not they are able to have the player banned. (I could provide a link, but only in Danish ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating