Slashdot Mirror
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?
-=SiGH=-
Why? Why do you need a player that plays DivX movies when the main thing people use DivX for is to rip DVDs and trade them? Are you going to rip your own DVDs and watch them in a crappier format?
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)
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
Considering even the cheapest PoS DVD player that redneck billy bob bought at Wal-Mart will play both VCDs and SVCDs that are burned on plain ordinary CD-Rs using any run-of-the-mill burner found in your HP Desktop that redneck billy bob also bought at Wal-Mart, the real question is:
Why? Why need support to play DivX format in a DVD player?
Is the DivX format any better quality than SVCD? Using standard CD-Rs, you are going to use close to the same amount of discs to get the same amount of video at the same quality.
DivX may have better audio than SVCD...but nothing will ever provide the DD 5.1, DTS, and 6.1(7.1???) sound quality of real DVDs.
I don't know about divx.. the thing that is very interesting to me is the network port. So, I can theoretically access my Linux file server, which has my MiniDV movies, exported to DVD VOB format. Also, as part of my creation process, I can watch them over the network, rather than burning DVD's as tests. And, once I'm done, I can have an easily accessed home movie archive via the network server.
It could also access my MP3 library on that Linux file server.. Could be a nice, small, quiet media server to replace most of my HTPC (Home Theater PC) functionality (everything except the HDTV receiver/recorder).
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.
Yeah... But then you'd have a loud computer standing next to your tv and have a kludgy interface that probably would make you have a keyboard there too.
:/
Not to speak about boot time, shutdown time, fsck time, etc.
It's the same as the difference between using your computer as a dvd player/cd player vs using a dedicated dvd player to watch your dvd's and play your music cd's in your livingroom.
I haven't read the article, but I'll wager that it doesn't have a ethernetport though...
That would be the major problem with this player. That you have to burn all your movies to cd before watching it.
I'd love to have one of these that was also capable of playing movies and mp3's over the network from my fileserver...
Think about it.
Sit in your sofa, turn it on using your remote, 4 seconds later your browsing through your movie collection, 10 seconds after turning it on you start viewing your recently downloaded Hikaru no Go episode. =)
You probably could do something like that using a "Linux in BIOS-eeprom" installation (to get fast boot times) and autoload some kind of special software that let you use a remote to browse the local harddrive or mounted nfs or smb shares.
But I'll bet that doing this would take more than a few hours *and* probably cost more than the Kiss player.
There are only a few select mainboards that work with the eeprom loaded linux, so you'd probably have to buy some new hardware to build a machine like that.
And it would probably not be fan-less or harddrive free either. (Thus not being quiet enough to run while listening to music)
Or you could get a X-box, chiping it and then install that mediaplayer thingie...
But that's also expensive and loud. (The X-box makes a terrible racket compared to, say, a dvd-player)
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Karma: Excellent (fuck, even in the future moderation doesn't work!)
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.