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DVD Player With DVI Output
ffierling writes "Why are there no big name DVD Players with digital video outputs? With all the available digital displays (LCD, plasma, DLP, etc) and the obvious benefits of an all-digital connection, it's easy to conclude the threat of litigation from copyright holders is holding up the big name manufacturers. So how is it V Inc. can sell their Bravo D1 DVD Player with DVI output? Are they below the MPAA's radar, or just quicker to market?"
and it's only $199. very nice!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
The ignorance, But why is that such a bad thing for the movie companies? Are they worried someone will use the signal from the DVD player to rip it?
big name companies want to make money. they do this by making products that everyone can use... of course they can ADD this to their devices - but that costs money. besides, S video and current standards don't degrade the quality very much, if not at all.
Fool! DVI is an encrypted data stream!
See this PDF for more information:
http://www.ddwg.org/if/data/0830991.pdf
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
When this thing is offered in the USA with Macrovision disabled, all regions playable at any time, and no forced chapters, then I'll whip out my VISA and buy one. But not until then.
[
I have a DVD player with DVI out. The fan is a little noisy and the case is kind of ugly. Also I don't have anything with DVI in.
As usual, Homer says it best.
"I'm a White male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are." -Homer eating Nuts 'n' Gum
If the market demands it, the features will be there.
Not anymore...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Sadly the story submitter chooses to get a quick karma-whore submission in before engaging his brain.
DVI can be no more "digital" than composite or s-video. If you're thinking of recording the output from this player via DVI and expecting magical bit-perfect copies of your DVD, think again.
If you pick up last month's Official Xbox Magazine they did a review and gave it a 9.0 out of 10 score. Apparently they loved it. If you want more information on it, track down someone with the magazine.
The main problem I have with this DVD player is that it DOESN'T seem to be available in many, if any, retail outlets.
Or is this just a strict pay-one-time only advertisement?
Coming soon - pyrogyra
for Monster to sell yet another overpriced cable. Have a tough time believing they will come bundled...
No copy protection issue here, because current DVD players cannot produce high definition video.
because I want to watch movies on a 35" tv and not a 17" LCD thats comparable in price to a 93 honda civic.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Get it while it lasts, whatever your motive is, because it is only time before this becomes controversial. I'm surprised that the company is willing to risk it. I'm sure the EFF is on their side, which is a great thing.
There are additional boards available to hack most decent DVD's players so they output SDI, which is a raw professional 270Mbps standard for digital interconnects. Most broadcast quality Plasma screens include an SDI input, and companies like Delphi produce them for the consumer market, and I've seen DVB-s digital tv set-top-boxes also hacked for SDI output, they look very good since the needless D>A>D process is removed.
Not true - Samsung has the DVD-HD931 which has been out on the market for a few months now. It has DVI output.
The Bravo D1 is better, but hey.
Expect other large consumer electronics manufacturers to have their models out within a few months.
Hmm... DVDs are 720x480, tv's are like 640x480....
forward thinking bastards.
Why don't they just stop all the chinanigans and stop to make a device that does 640x480 through say 2048x1536 or something. If you need more than that many pixels to enjoy plotless drivel you might as well go join a militia and blow up shit for real.
Instead no, people will make crappy incremental updates. Call it "new and improved" and sell the thing for 200$ more than the previous.
Bullshit. My digital cameral can already capture 2048x1536. You think people can make a TV to display it!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Maybe when the cost of connecting the monitor to the DVD player is less than cost of a new DVD player, then we'll see it in wider practice.
Better buy some more VHS head cleaner tapes before they run out...
To some of us following the home theater scene, the Bravo D1 may be old news ;), but I can understand that it may not be common knowledge. In any case, the Home Theater Forum is a great resource in general and it has a couple threads on this player as well. Of note from that second link is that the Bravo is not the only DVI player on the market:
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
To add an extra output a manufacturer has to incorporate additional technology, redesign circuitry and the backpanel, test the whole setup, etc.
This isn't a fantastic amount to do - after all, this is probably a minor upgrade to most manufacturers - but it is rather pointless if 99.99 percent of your target audience won't even know what the port can be used for, let alone actually use it.
And why spend the time and effort incorporating an $5 (for argument's sake) upgrade if it makes next to no difference on how many units you'll sell? Right now, that $5 pe4r unit is lost profit in what's already a very cut-throat industry.
As DVI is a fairly new development (at least to the average home electronics consumer) it'll be a while before there's a major demand for DVI outputs on DVD players, etc. Gradually though, the major manufacturers will add DVI support, initially at the top of their ranges, then later throughout their catalogues.
In the end, it comes down to supply and demand. Right now, there's very little demand for DVI support. But you can bet the farm that by the time there actually is critical mass demand for DVI support it'll be there across the board.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
However even if it did I dont expect the result to be much superior than the analog RGB VGA output for the simple reason that the DVD disk doesn't have any more info than that.
for example if you try to play a dvd on an XGA or SXGA system it looks WORSE(!) than on the lower resoultion SVGA. the reason is very simple , the dvd has to interpolate the pixels and does a bad job when the image is changing quickly. SVGA is optimal for DVD , and XGA is optimal for HDTV.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"Why are there no big name DVD Players with digital video outputs?"
You mean like a computer?
This looks to me like the Apex-style DVD players. Looks like they modified a PC DVD player and added a modified video card and voila!
Why not use your computer? Now if I could find 50' cables, it would be nice...
-- Leeeter than leet
What's most funny is that no one today would likely think of "ripping" a DVD from a capture card, just because all it takes is a $50 DVD drive and a braindead piece of software. And yet the manufacturers stick by their "no RGB" guns as if it actually means something.
BTW my "DVD player" does have RGB outputs. It also has a macrovision-less s-vid output.
Duh...
The reasoning behind using DVI and upconversion is that many HDTV's will upconvert 480p to 1080i or 720p internally (this is most common on DLP, LCD, Plasma, LCOS and other non-CRT technologies). By converting it internally before the digital stream is converted to analog, you should get a better conversion, or in theory you can add an external scaler (say an iScan or anything from Faroudja) and output a digital 480p signal for it to scale instead of an analog one.
The Bravo D1 is the first, and currently has better quality than Samsung, but it won't be the last for long. Popular rumor has Denon coming out with a universal DVD player (DVD, DVD-A, SACD) with DVI output (with HDCP) by the end of the year, but if the HDCP compatibility issues keep up, I wouldn't be surprised to see it be delayed. Of course, HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) is what I can't wait for. One cable the size of a USB connector that can carry an HDTV signal and 8 channels of audio, so long cable mess!
You can find the pertinent information here: Samsung DVD-HD931
Retail price is $299
Until a large percentage of TV's start having DVI input, DVI output for consumer grade DVD players (or any other video player) is pointless from the economic standpoint.
In addition, component optical output is already far and away high enough quality to render the need for DVI moot.
The only TV-class displays that I know of which feature DVI inputs are flatpanel LCD and some flatpanel plasma displays... which are far more expensive than I can justify when compared to a comparably priced rear projection or CRT set.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Those graphic artists that help make PS2 games would actually have to start putting in detail.
Of course you could always go see a real movie. Pretty impressive resolution. Bah.
As other have mentioned, firewire can be copy restricted, using and encrypted in transport. Also, it's a high bandwidth, uncompressed data stream, which is not easy to copy.
The MPAA still does exert some control here, as you can tell from the lack of DVD players with FireWire interfaces. mitsubishi has been talking about them for years, to fit into their cool Havi system. But, because of the all the MPAA usage restriction hysteria, they can't bring one to market.
Also, they block any analog outputs over 480P (e.g. component video, YPrPb, outputs at 720P or 1080i). These are analog outputs, which are not easily copied (try recording your VGA out). But, they still won't allow them because of the CSS license restrictions and lack of Macrovision.
This is also closely related to why you cannoy buy an HDTV DirecTV receiver with a Firewire output, and thus cannot record HDTV programs off satellite. The technology has been viable for years, D-VHS recorders are available and cheap, but the content providers prevent DirecTV from adding this feature. This slows down the adoption of HDTV, and stifles innovation. Don't you just love the MPAA?
So, do you want to pay for the bandwidth to host Slashdot? There is nothing wrong with recooping your losses. It's not like Slashdot is whoreing out products and advertisements through every topic that's posted.
Life is not for the lazy.
I suffer from a disease known as Munchausen syndrome by open proxy. It causes me to accept stray network packets, and purposely inject crc errors, just to get the NAK attention that I crave. But this is no worse than suffering from the affliction that ffierling struggles against. We read that since there are not (yet) many DVI capable dvd players, "it's easy to conclude the threat of litigation from copyright holders is holding up the big name manufacturers."
Easy if you're a paranoid tin-foil hat wearing geek, that is. Absent from ffierling's conclusion is a factual foundation. He's twisted facts to suit his theories.
It does not take a great deal of effort to imagine where there are not (yet) DVI capable players on the market. First among them is the economy. People aren't buying fancy schmancy toys, and in the DVD market in particular, low-cost players rules the roost. In other words, the focus in the industry has been to compete on cost, no features.
A second reason that comes to mind is that, well, not many people want to shell out the monies for a DVD player with DVI capabilites. But now that DVI displays are catching on, that's going to change. The chicken had to wait for the egg to show up first, if you will.
There's this little yellow hole labeled "Video our" on the back of my TV with a little red hole and white hole below that. I seem to have matching holes on the back of my video capture card. Can someone clue me in as to what they are for?
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Why would the MPAA care about DVI out?
That's *exactly* what I was going to say 8)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I also find it interesting there are no digital televisions. There are lots of HDTV and DTV monitors, but just try to find a television (Not NTSC but DTV). My 14 year old TV is awaiting a replacement, but none are to be found. I don't want a home theatre system. I want a TV that will work in a motorhome. Am I stuck with NTSC or a DISH subscription? I just want clear 11:00 news.
The truth shall set you free!
Why let them tell you what to get? Do some home work, go buy a dvd player and hack the hell out of it. Regions? To quote the great philospher Nelson of The Simpsons... haha!
how much did you pay for this 'undercover' internet marketing blitz?
Let's hope they fire off a few units before their mailbox gets DDOS'ed by RIAA lawyers.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's funny how even if the manufacturers don't bother to encrypt the DVI output with HDCP, I can't think of a solution that will capture a raw, uncompressed DVI video stream to disk. You would need an insane amount of SCSI RAID storage in order to do it. If I remember correctly it's something like hundreds of megabytes per second of data in a 1080i feed. But, I guess this time the manufacturers aren't waiting for technology to outflank the content industry (see RIAA for examples of this ;-)
The real question is: How good is the scaling algorithm that's used on these? I've seen 480p upscaled to 1080i and the quality is amazing if done properly! It almost makes those regular DVDs look like hi-def. As a matter of fact, looking at 1080i scaled from 480p on the new Terminator 2 DVD and comparing it to the WMP9 version, there were screen captures that were hard to tell apart.
So, has anyone evaluated these units, and is the scaling as good as D-Scaler, or a Faroudja scaler? I might be interested in buying one if they're only a couple of hundred dollars and I don't have to have an HTPC whirring away in my living room.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
When this thing is offered in the USA with Macrovision disabled, all regions playable at any time, and no forced chapters, then I'll whip out my VISA and buy one. But not until then.
If you're worried about Macrovision then this product isn't for you. Macrovision only affects analog outputs. Why would you pay extra for a DVD player with DVI output if your TV doesn't have DVI input capability?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
A: Because the movie/tv industry is deathly afraid of it.
The promise of FireWire is a single cable, and an intelligent system, connecting all of your electronics devices together. Not just final output (like DVI), or tied to a host (like USB), but a peer-to-peer, universal, high speed bus that can carry content as well as control data. Any of your devices can communicate with one another, and, where applicable, control or send information to one another - all the while sending pristine digital content.
DVI is more attractive to some because it's a final output format, with less fundamental chance of being manipulated or captured by anything else. And copy protection can be enforced in the "monitor" or display device, if need be...FireWire could connect all of your equipment, including your computer, appliances, and more. It could even do it wirelessly.
Imagine one single, intelligent cable chain connecting all of your entertainment equipment - no more rat's nest of endless cabling, no more dumb devices unaware of anything but themselves...that is one of the purposes, and the promise, of FireWire.
www.m-audio.com sells a cheap coaxoptical S/PDIF converter. If you have a reciever that you liek that speaks optical and another component that speaks coax, this is for you. Seems to work fine with AC3 streams too.
Are they below the MPAA's radar /.)
Uhm, not anymore.... (that's assuming MPAA reads
Details here...
More on that unit...
With Macrovision disabled you can take the composite video out of a DVD player and send it into an AV input on a bog standard VHS machine. If you already have TV RF piped through the house, you can now tune into the video channel and watch DVDs in any room.
Even if you don't plan on using analog outputs on your main set up, it's worthwhile to not have them crippled in case you do need them for anything.
SGtHT did a review with a couple of DVD players using DVI. Their conclusion: for 480p it just doesn't matter.
When DVD's are 720p or 1080i, then it may.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
stupid question. i've seen sony vcr's with firewire inputs, do they have some sort of limitation that cripples the input?
Yeah, the thing that the movie companies might not like is a pure digital stream off their precious DVDs, this means that you could concievably rip the film to Divx or similar without there being any Analogue conversion anywhere along the line... pure digital makes for easier compression, cleaner image, better all round for the rippers...
Or, you could do a digitally near perfect copy of the DVD to another DVD... which is probably more to the point as the small difference in visible quality would be lost in a Divx copy anyway, especially when compressed down enough to fit on a 700Meg CD anyway.
DVI output from a DVD player? What kind of CUPS driver do you need for this thing? But more importantly, how much paper would you need?
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
Lovely! Those links are referred right back to Slashdot. That's one way to avoid a slashdotting.
s -its-going-to-slashdot. Says it all really.
Yeah, good for them. If you read the page that you're referred back to it get's more interesting: http://slashdot.org/slashdot-should-cache-article
Of course, if you really want to see the links that the parent article refers to, it can be done. I would tell you how here but it would kind of defeat the reasons for hometheaterforum.com's clever anti-slashdotting defence. Besides, it's not as if isn't bleeding obvious how to look at those pages if you really want to.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
And the stupid thing is why worry about the RGB outputs? RGB is already lossy from the source (4:2:0 Y'CbCr). SDI output from DVD would be far more worrysome, since that'll give you the exact output from the MPEG-2 decoder in its native pixel space.
Of course, as you point out, DeCSS rather opened the barn door on this one!
My video compression blog
The cable I CAN plug into my "box", is DVI. I have a new ATI All In Wonder Radeon. it has DVI OUT. Imagine that.
Also, there is a reason to stay digital as LONG as possible. You want the analog distance to be kept SHORT.
If you do have to have a D->A->D process, keep the A part SHORT. Use lots of long digital wires if you need to, you'll get a better picture in the end.
Take it to the extreme... Send an analog signal around the world on a copper pair.... Look at the result... Now send a digital signal around the world on a copper pair (or anything else), look at the result.. Ohhh, Digital is pretty picture.
- Voxel.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
When this thing is offered in the USA with Macrovision disabled, all regions playable at any time, and no forced chapters, then I'll whip out my VISA and buy one.
Better off paying for it with cash. That way when the MPAA has some new legislation passed that deams the device illegal they'll have a harder time fitting you for that orange jumpsuit.
I recently (Saturday) purchased a rather nice 46" sony projection TV. It's 1080i (HDTV) compatible and has a single DVI input. I'm planning on attempting to configure my computer to output DVI to the TV before I resort to s-video. Apparently it's difficult to get one's computer's DVI output to sync properly with a TV's input. Does anyone know of any resources to help plan this? Or any tips?
Also, the other thing I'm wondering. I've heard that the DVI inputs that are now being placed on most "high end" (lets say $1500 - $2000 +) TVs are intended to be used for the cable/sat/whatever HDTV boxes of the future. If that's true and DVI is being put on TVs with one specific purpose in mind, I wonder if over the next five or so years we're going to see more DVI inputs on our TVs to handle more devices. DVI cables are cheap (compared to, lets say, those $100+ monster component cables) and wouldn't be subject to interference since they're digital. If I was making decisions while designing those TVs, I'd love to keep everyone stuck on component where companies can suck up hundreds of dollars on 4' cables. So what do you guys think the industry is planning on doing with DVI? I've yet to see more then one DVI input on a TV. If they were planning on replacing everything with DVI, I'd expect to see at least two (DVI and your broadcast television). But I'm only seeing one... hrmm. Thoughts?
The (very slight) convenience of having all the wires in my TV/stereo be the same type of wire, is more than negated by the inconvenience of having to replace every component of my TV/stereo to do this.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
That is incredibly understated.
For you to make a DVD player, you have to get permission to use CSS. For you to get permission to use CSS, the MPAA can make you sign any sort of contract they want, or you don't get to use CSS legally. That's all there is to it.
I don't think there is any "threat of litigation" keeping DVD players back, I believe it much more simple and direct than that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Because that voids the warrenty, and I am still giving money to a association that supports bad products. I shouldn't have to hack the hell out of anything to get something I want.
Just for the information:
:)
HDCP is High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, though TV's with DVI will support unencrypted information, as well. At least my HDCP/DVI equipped TV will support the output from my Geforce 4.
My TV will also upconvert signals from 480P/i to 540p and also 720p to 1080i. Upconversion sure seems to be legal.
TV is a Toshiba, by the way.
I'm guessing the reason it looks worse is that your projector can't handle those resolutions, therefore it's the PROJECTOR which is trying to down-scale the image to fit it to SVGA, etc.
I have a XVGA DLP and it looks much better @ 1024x768 than at 800x600 because PowerDVD does a very nice job upscaling the image. If I try to send 1600x1200 to the 1024x768 DLP then it looks like ass, not because of the player, but because of the DLP down-conversion.
ALWAYS watch at the NATIVE resolution of your DLP for the best picture quality. Period.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Nice one. For more about the "actual" syndrome, check out this book description.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Typo Correction: the first line should read "As other have mentioned, DVI can be copy restricted, using and encrypted in transport. Also, it's a high bandwidth, uncompressed data stream, which is not easy to copy." (substiture DVI for Firewire).
The difference being: DVI is an uncompressed digital output - for connection to a display device. Since it's uncompressed, it runs at gigabit/second speeds, and is difficult to copy.
Firewire runs at 400Mbps (the new apple PC's have 800Mbps firewire), and is typically used for transferring compressed data streams (usually MPEG2) and for general networking between devices. Some displays have built-in HD tuners, and take firewire as input. For example, the Mitsubishi HDTV's. In this case, DVI is not needed, because the HDTV stream is sent over the firewire, and decoded in the internal tuner. It is then passed internally to the display, so protected DVI is not needed.
If the display does not have an internal tuner, it would have an external HD Set Top Box (STB). The STB is connected to the TV via DVI, and connected to a recorder, or other A/V devices, via firewire.
My new TV can take component inputs. But my VCR will only output RF or composite.
Do I need to replace my VCR?
No, of course not because the TV also takes RF, composite and svideo.
Just a audio receivers have RCA inputs as well as the much better digital inputs.
Why would the addition of firewire mean you'd have to replace everything?
You can't always get what you want. - M. Jagger
so, you can print vidcaps using dvi2ps?
Not true. If you look at the spec for Macrovision, it encompasses about 7 or 8 layers (features) some of which are analog in nature (twisting chroma phase, screwing with the black level) and some are purely digtal and are present as detectable signatures in a decoded stream of digital video. Take a look if you don't believe me.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Alternatively you could start working on building yourself an HDCP pass through dongle right now. Can't be all that hard.
The motion picture industry is certainly concerned about you making copies of DVD's but let's face it those have been cracked already. They are a somewhat lost cause. What they are now attempting to guard against is people making copies of High Definition video. The content that will be coming out on blue laser equiped DVD's at 720p+ resolutions. The notion is, that end to end encryption is the answer. By putting the decoder in the display you are screwed. OK not really but it does become ever so slightly harder.
BTW Samsung makes a VERY nice DVD player (DVD-HD931) with DVI out that additionaly does scaling to 720p and 3:2 pulldown using the Faroudja chip. Now at $250 that is a bargain and a half. If only the damn thing would put that signal out RGB so I could watch it on my Sony 1271 projector... I'd be a happy camper. We need the Europeans to put out 720p on SCART connectors (OK so maybe just I do). Curious that none of European market machines include the Faroudja chip.... Actually really irritating is more like it (once again possibly editorial).
So.... this is all FULLY above the Radar and be prepared to grab your ankles because you know what is coming...
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if there are any DVD players that have Ethernet hardware such that a DVD player could have its own IP address and be hooked up to the 'net for remote reading/writer such as using iSCSI?
Like someone said before, there are several SDI-modded DVD transports out there. The idea is, you can then take the SDI and run it into a scaler, either a $4000 stand-alone device or with a PCI-based solution. The last link shows the old Holo3DGraph card that would take video in (SDI, 480i component, S-Video, composite), scale, deinterlace, and process it, then pass it over the PCI bus to your main video card for display. The new H3D-II, which is in beta still (I got one!) can take all that, as well as 1080i/720p inputs over component, RGB, or DVI and scale it to the desired res. Best of all, it has a DVI daughterboard that can output DVI directly, without having to pass video over the bus and incur delay. The DVI DVD player isn't such a big deal. There has been hardware out for more than a year to do that, and more. You just have to know where to look, and be crazy enough to get involved with it.
My tiBook has a DVI output ... does that mean that it's outputting a digital signal if I play a DVD on it?
That would change the definition of "the analog hole" just a little bit eh?
simon
home page
Here's a thought. Why can't some manufacturer use DeCSS or qrpff or one of those bad boys.
Because it's in a consumer player, with no mass storage or connectivity save the A/V outputs, the MPAA would have a damn hard time making the argument that it's piracy. And they wouldn't have to pay the license fee to the DVD-CSS consortium either!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Over the ranges that we are talking, 1-2m, noise introduced by the signal traveling over distance is not a major factor. The digital to analog conversion is going to introduce more errors. The real error prone process is the analog to digital conversion. Which only happens for digital screens, such as LCD, CRT (which still comprise the vast majority of installed screens) do not.
Take it to the extreme... Send an analog signal around the world on a copper pair.... Look at the result... Now send a digital signal around the world on a copper pair (or anything else), look at the result.. Ohhh, Digital is pretty picture
You for get that a analog signal is used to represent a digital digital signal. They are both subject to the same signal lost over distance. That's why they still have repeaters on fiber optic cables. Digital just has better error detection & correction.
- Alex
Acually, my $49.00 Cyberhome CH-402 (from Radio Shack, no less!) has RGB outputs for a progressive scan display. Unfortunately, my $1000.00 Sony monitor doesn't do progressive scan. D'oh!
;)
So, I use it to go via S-Video into my ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 Card, and could get perfect captures at 740x480. It sounds like you have the same setup (or similar to) as mine, with a video card that has RGB and S-Video output.
The best part is the ATI AIW card puts out S-video without Macrovision, and ignores it on the inputs witht the proper software "patches" applied.
However, for actually ripping a DVD, though, DVDx or DVDdecrypter seem to be the best tools I have seen yet. They remove all the digial Macrovision information and region coding, and do a totally digital copy with no D/A/D conversion.
For an excellent source of how-to info see the www.dvdhelp.com website, AKA vcdhelp, svcdhelp, etc.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
"Dinner for One" a cute old TV peice about a crazy aldy and her butler having a dinner part by herself. No region restriction or CSS. My parents brought it back from Europe and, of course, it was a PAL DVD. Their standalone NTSC DVD player wouldn't tought it. However, a computer has an easy time reading it and I reclocked it to an NTSC data stream and gave them a copy they could play. Encountered no protection trying to do so.
Rare, but extant.
Also unproctedted DVI is far more common, AFAIK, computer video cards do not implement it, nor do computer LCD panels.
Admittantly expensive (roughly $1500), this player does have a HDCP copy-protected DVI out (the same type of copy-protected DVI output you will find that every DVD player will have), but this is disabled on all models currently. Marantz is promising to publish the unlock code (likely a series of buttons to push on the remote control) in due time.
The reason is explained on the above-mentioned page:
"This output is not currently activated from the factory - We are awaiting approval from the DVD working group (Legal issues regarding copyrights, etc). When approval is granted, we will post the code to activate this feature on our website. Please feel free to call us with any questions."
It seems that Marantz, not wanting to endanger their DVD license, are awaiting approval for this. I wonder if someone has leaked this code out into the public yet.
Aside of this it is rather hard to even find this player currently, just like the Bravo, since it is rather new. The price is not too bad considering that someone that wants a HDCP DVI output on their DVD player likely already has an expensive HDTV or similar tv or projector that is solidly in the 'expensive' budget class. The cheaper TVs simply do not have an appropriate DVI input anyway.
the dude posting this makes the assumption that DVI is missing from DVD players because of MPAA... wrong.
More likely...take a look at how expensive those LCD TVs are. You can build one with a mini-ITX board, a TV-capable video card, and a PC-type LCD panel for half what a real "TV" one costs. And...people are paying it.
So, why gut that market before necessary?
This is probably a good player. But it's just another incarnation of the Sigma Designs DVD kit.
See: Sigma Designs DVD Kits
And remember that Sigma Designs hasn't been too forthcoming with the OSS Community?
DivX Networks Press Release
XVID also has comments (look for "Sigma")
Anyway, there are several players out there already using these kits.
KISS Technology
Revoy -- to name a couple.
I bought one of these players myself (the KISS DP-500) and they are great, but still full of little bugs and the community is just building now to get into the GPL part of the source - just not sure how much of it we will be able to modify and now much will remain closed-source.
Here is a community of KISS owners so you can see what types of issues people are dealing with on these Sigma players.
I use JunkBuster, which can block or spoof referrer info. Annoyingly, it defaulted to spoofing UserAgent, telling the outside world that I'm running a Macintosh 68K, so sites like download.com only showed me Mac software! It took me ages to fix that problem!
I dont think this player is that hot. Check out the KiSS DP-500 which additionally supports DVD-RW and DVD+RW (the Bravo only supports DVD+-R), OGG and Divx 3.11, 4 and 5. The DP-500 also comes with a 10/100 ethernet port so that you can stream audio, video and jpegs directly from your computer. There's also a webradio feature to stream directly from the internet.
Yes there are still a few bugs in the software, as someone mentioned above, but they are slowly being worked out with new software releases.
There's already DVD players you can buy in North America with Macrovision disabled - region free, too. Most Apex Digital DVD players are hackable or have hidden menues built in to disable Macrovision. I bought an AD-3201 in about oct2001 from Future Shop (yes, I live in Canada). Completely un-modded, you could change the region code and disable Macrovision from a hidden menu (if you have an AD-3201 - while the disc tray is open, press '8421' on the remote to access the menu). The Apex remotes really suck, but a universal solved that problem.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
"I want to distribute this (idea/song/movie) to millions of people so I can make lots of money off of it, but at the same time, the (idea/song/movie) is still mine mine mine...
Having your cake and eating it, too? Very cool. Very addictive as well, seemingly.
(Seems like maby we had better art created when the artists were SPONSORED, not manufactured?)
First, I can't remember if it is 3:2 or 2:3, someone feel free to correct me;)
Second of all, it is very irritating to see 24fps material be shown as 30fps. It becomes far from smooth. So I still wonder why nobody has thought of (and done something about it) outputting 72/75/90hz (24/PAL/NTSC) scaled up digital progressive video from a DVD player. You can make use of the motion hints for making the frames inbetween look better (and not just reproducing them) and it would look much better on good and fast high definition displays (such as DLP projectors for instance).
But alas, it will only be a dream until one does it oneself I guess:)
The really simple reason is that the DVD Consortium license any DVD player manufacturer has to sign in order to make a player requires that they will not include any digital video signal output from the DVD player.
Sure, most players (in Europe at least) have component RGB output, but the signal is pretty poor compared to running DVI out through to (for example) a plasma screen.
A couple of small outfits in the UK do sell modded players with DVI out, but the cost is prohibitively expensive if you're not obsessive about your home cinema system.
...the European Union has made it a crime to import out of region DVD's - score 1 point for the evil mega corps.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The RIAA/MPAA couldn't care less about no-name companies like this. They probably don't even have a clue about whether or not this thing really works. Let the FTC deal with 'em.
You're going to have to do that eventually anyways... unless you're one of those people who still clings to their old 19" Curtis Mathis black&white tube type that nicely fills an entire wall... but looks really cool, and keeps the room warm in the winter.
It's the same physical port, but your computer's DVI port is NOT compatible with a HD monitor's DVI port. The signal the HD monitor expects is a special copy-protected signal that is EIA-861-compliant (whatever that means :-).
Is the digital output Macrovision-"enhanced", though?
It seems silly to take a clean digital source, convert it to analog in order to introduce intentional signal degradation, and then convert it back to digital for output...
I remember seeing a TV with DVI input (maybe the gateway 42") and some fine print along the lines of it would accept DVI from a computer, but not from an HDTV box or satellite box or something (or maybe vice-versa--worked with boxes, not computers.) Is this that optional encryption people are talking about?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Until some jag-off decided to post it to slashdot...
What's the big deal? Somebody says "Digital" and everyone pisses on themselves. It does not matter if the signal integrity is better when the source is not. DVI will not create information that is not there. Conclusion: HDTV through DVI is indistinguishable from HDTV through component video. Don't be a victim of marketing.
There are currently several high-end manufacturers currently offering or planning on offering players with DVI out, but in all cases I have observed, the old-fashioned component output offers far superior image quality.
V. Inc seem to be the second company to make MPEG4/DVD Player. The first would be KiSS Technology DP-450 and DP-500. While those are way more expensive, about twice the cost of this Brovo D1. Just one thing I want to mention is while I was looking at their FAQ page the faq states "MPEG-4 AVI files using ISO 9660 format and XviD encoded files." Is that mean if you have a video recorded in DiVX, it won't work. Well, I can't tell that, cuz I don't own it. May be it will play, but the company don't list it, cuz it have to pay DiVX for the license fee, while XviD is free. But, since it doesn't say it support all MPEG4 format, if the player won't play DiVX , 3iVX, WM9, or any other format based on MPEG4 standard, you can't very cry to their tech support about it.
Hey, that's a neat hack, although with el-cheapo Apex DVD players only costing $40 at Walmart that play DVD, VCD, SVCD, MP3, JPG, MPEG, etc., it's probably easier to just buy a cheap DVD player for every set in your house.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Actually, that's rather a good point, isn't it?
Do you realize how long it takes to convert a DVI into an mpeg which is acceptable by DVD players?
On my Athlon 1.4Ghz it was taking 12 hours for 1.5 hours of video.
However, having this leads to more questions, since AVI as a format can support pretty much all video compression codecs in existance.
The one they advertise support for is called "MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile" and "MPEG-4 Simple." My guess is that they're referring to fast and slow motion opendivx support, though that could be off.
But a good questions are: how upgradable is this? Can it take new codecs? And what exactly do they mean by "MPEG-4 Simple" and advanced (since as far as I know these are not codecs that are in use). And how well does it deal with losing its place in the file (in case there are errors), with mangled files (is it all or nothing?), and with files of different sizes and frames per second?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Key points that many posters to this thread don't seem to know:
Like many replies have noted a cheap PC is really the way to go. For $500 you can build a machine like this...
1. DVD Player digital audio out
2. MB w/digital audio
3. 1.4ghz Athlon or equivalent
4. DVI Output video card
5. Happauge Hardware MPEG2 encoder/decoder (audio/video)
6. SageTV $59 (PVR Software, no monthlies) or equivalent
7. 120GIG drive $99
Done! Solved! Mission complete! Encryption got you down? Mplayer's Mencoder includes DeCSS. Want backups? Get a DVD-R, want firewire? Comes with many MB's or can be purchased for a trivial amount. I hear they even make compact and or Black cases so they'll match your TV!
Say goodbye to the old...please...let it go!
Hey, buddy, every check the specs on DVD? there aint even 800x600 worth of information on the disk. so signal process your brains out. taint nothing more to see. there's no there there.
When did DVD players start generating TeX output?
Ah, but can you go to the kitchen to get snacks and drinks without needing to pause the movie? ;-)
"HDCP: what it is and how to use it"
http://www.siimage.com/pdf/223300.pdfr ticle&articleid=CA209091
http://www.e-insite.net/ednmag/index.asp?layout=a
I'm currently using the Bravo's DVI out with a front projector. Currently the Bravo doesn't use HDCP, but a salesperson with V Inc. told me they are going to have to use HDCP soon.