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First Certified DivX/DVD Player Released

Posted by timothy on from the catch-and-press-release dept.

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?

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Homepage and a little info by madsdyd · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Want a review? by finity · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  3. Approach with caution by egrinake · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. I have one by ianezz · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.