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?

Yeah. Wicked.

[torpor]

Nothing like being sold something you could build yourself in a few hours...

Sale of DVD Burners

[chrisseaton]

"This could make the purchase of dvd burners slow down in my opinion."

Why? You need a burner to make the DivX DVD, don't you?

cebit == european

[igotmybfg]

good thing that it's not coming out in US, too, or the company that produces it (KiSS Technologies) would be sued out of existence.

Why not Xbox

[sardonic2]

I have a nice little black box that sits on my desk next to me that does DivX playback, Ogg, MP3. You name it. DVD playback works also. I can run MAME on it, and play console games from tons of different consoles including Xbox. Not to mention the ability to run Linux, doubt that dvd player can do that.

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[igotmybfg]

No. You'll download movies in DivX format, burn them onto CDR, and play those on this uber-player.

Oh great.

[I Am The Owl]

Please, everyone swarm to try and convince me that DivX players will be used to play something other than pirated DVD and VCD recordings. How transparent.

DP-500 has 10/100 Ethernet

[-tji]

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).

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[jilles]

In addition to the obvious convenience for e.g. Kazaa users, one could use this as a cheap alternative to creating dvd's from your homemovies. Just convert your homemovies to divx, burn them on a cheap cdr (as opposed to still very expensive dvdrs) and you have nice cheap good quality video that you can watch on your vcr.

Second idea: cd companies could burn a divx video on along with the sound on a multisession cd. Should play just fine in any cd player and owners of PCs/Macs/Whatever or this cool device get a little extra.

There's plenty of legal uses for this device. I want one even though I don't own a video camera :-).

Re:Oh great.

[James_Duncan8181]

Why would I need a DivX player to play a VCD? It is already on a CD and I can't improve the quality by converting it to DivX, it would just be wasting cycles and a CD-R.

Re:Oh great.

[eXtro]

98% of the use will be for illegal content. I'd like to be able to burn an hour or so of video from a digital camcorder. I use a DVD-R right now but to be honest DivX is good enough for most things.

The shortcoming of this is that while I can record stuff with DivX on a CD-R most people won't have a similar machine, because of this sharing is less possible.

Personally, I wouldn't use it for pirated movies, if I like it I either buy it or rent it through NetFlix.

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[Flounder]

So is that MP3 player you use to play the downloaded music. What's your point?

convenience copying

[timothy]

I have squashed into divx a few of my favorite movies for the same reason that I've squashed a lot of my CDs into ogg files: because it's easier to access them that way.

If I had an infinite hard drive and a large television, I might want a bit-for-bit copy; since I'm more likely to use a PC monitor to watch movies, and since even my largest hard drive would only hold a handful of movies at DVD-size, I compress. I've never downloaded warezed movies, nor do I put mine of a big anon. ftp site ;)

But when I feel like watching a few minutes of "Barcelona," I can do it without putting the original disk in the drive. (Which I think is a good enough reason all by itself to compress, anyhow.)

timothy

Ok, I'll bite.

[duggy_92127]

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?

Even right there in your own question, the answer is obvious. Say I've ripped my DVDs and traded them with somebody. I'd like to play the ones I got in return, wouldn't I?

I'll give you another scenario. I rip recordings off my TiVo, encode them to DivX, and store them in a much smaller form on my file server. It would be great to have a device to play these back again on the TV, instead of just on a computer.

Doug

Re:I have one

[ianezz]

Right.

OTOH, computers usually are noisy and don't fit too well in the living room. Plus, I'm too lazy to

• Look for an IrDA remote control
• Develope a unified front-end to mplayer, ogg123, mpg321 and an image viewer.

I was getting tired to plug/unplug my laptop into the TV set, so I just bought that player, which is less versatile than my laptop, but it is quiet and it does the job.

Re:Yeah. Wicked.

[Mattsson]

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)

Re:I have one

[C32]

It uses a realmagic mpeg2/4 decoder chip, the company which I might mention has a history of evil closedness of their drivers and of stealing GPL software (xvid) and passing it off as their own.
Also, it will never be able to playback advanced profile mpeg4 (a lot of divx 5.02/03 and possibly newer versions of xvid), that's a limitation of the decoder chip.
Thirdly, given the variety in the divx world, there are several more or less esoteric variant formats like ms-vki-mpeg4v2/3, avi files with subtitles in so-and-so format, sound codecs like "divx audio" (wma6) and of course there will invariably be many files which desync given the many many hackish ways to encode and interleave vbr audio and video in avi format...
Suffice to say, if you can in any way get a modded xbox or build a HTPC yourself for the same price, do that instead of buying this.

VHS

[KalvinB]

I have a number of VHS tapes that I'd like to get into digital format. It'd be nice to beable to cram of few of them onto a single DVD since VHS quality isn't really that great anyway.

Ben

Re:DivX SVCD?

[CUGWMUI]

I beg to disagree.. When properly encoded, SVCD's leave DivX FAR behind. I have SVCDs that I can honestly say look nothing different from DVDs. Just because 4 > 2, doesn't mean that all MPEG4 is better than MPEG2 (in quality alone, not in quality/size ration). I will agree that I have also seen a few high quality DivX files, but they are not always flawless. And VCD's are badmouthed just because in the pirate world, they're rarely encoded at high quality of motion-precision from a high-quality source. They're actually pretty good, and definitely better than the "average" DivX file floating around in IRC (not to say that VCD is better than DivX.. it isn't).