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?

Comments

Re:Sale of DVD Burners

[Spazholio]

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).

Homepage and a little info

[madsdyd]

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

Want a review?

[finity]

Tom's Hardware Review
Slashdot article refering to this review

Yes, this article minus the "We're releasing it now" was posted on /. a while ago.

Approach with caution

[egrinake]

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.

Re:Hi

[David_Bloom]

Actually, Divx;) is the name of the hacked MPEG4 codec (versions 3.x and below). Divx is the name of the rental system and the legal (versions 4.x and above) version of the codec, which isn't just a hack of Microsoft's MPEG4.

(Just a little clarification/correction)

I have one

[ianezz]

I purchased one three weeks ago (a KiSS DP-450), but AFAIK it has been on the european market since late 2002.

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):

• if it's a DVD, well, it plays the DVD, just like every other DVD player
• if it's a CD full of MP3/OGG files, it is mounted and you can browse the content with the remote control and play the file. Of course it is really Linux under the hood, so it understands also symlinks. Apparently it ignores ID3 tags and similars. No playlists. No fast-forward/rewind while playing.
• if it's a CD full of JPEG images, is starts a full-screen slideshow (and you can navigate, zoom and rotate with the remote control). Not exactly fast if your average image is 1MB, but acceptable.
• if it's a CD with DivX files on it, you can browse the content, select and play

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.

Re:Hi

[David_Bloom]

You don't understand. Read my ENTIRE post.

• DivX was called DivX;) in verisons 3 and below, and is an illegal rip of M$'s MPEG4 codec.
• DivX version 4 and above is a legal, written-from-scratch MPEG4 implementation.

My experience with the DP-500

[Rande]

It took a couple of weeks for it to arrive, but it finally got to me.

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 .iso that is used to update the firmware.

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.