One of my friends has an amazing DVD player that will play DivX movies. Its a generic looking player, can’t remember the brand name, but its not something I’ve ever heard of. Its a few years old, and I fear he may have imported it.
What do you guys think? Any chance I could find a DVD player with DivX capabilities? I’m not really willing to pay more than 200 bucks.
I don’t even think they’re made any more. DivX was an attempt at a proprietary format by Circuit City, and it flopped like a mofo, and I believe they discontinued it. The name has resurfaced as a video codec, but it shares nothing with the original Disc standard.
In short, unless you scour eBay or something, you’re probably out of luck.
To clarify, are we talking about the hardware standard or the video codec?
Video Codec, my friend can take a divx-movie (which is a compressed format requiring much less space than VCD for similar quality), burn it on a CD, and play it in his DVD player. Basically I have a lot of video on my computer and I want to be able to watch it on my TV. The nice thing about divx is a 90 minute, 700 meg file still has watchable quality. Whereas, in VCD you would need at least 2 CD’s possibly more. I understand CD’s are cheap, it’s more for the annoyance factor of having to switch disks in the middle.
In any case, most american/japanese manufacturers aren’t compatible with divx format, because of pirating concerns (it basically has the same appeal as MP3 files, small files, easy to download, decent quality). I plan on using it for legal purposes, mostly home videos and backup copies of VHS movies.
anybody know what I’m talking about?
Why do I get the feeling this thread is about to be closed?
I’ve seen a few DivX/MPEG-4 players from non-big-name manufacturers. For those of us who do our own video productions, the MPEG-4 codec is a considerable improvement over MPEG-2 which is used in standard DVD-Video files.
Search the player listings at VideoHelp.com.
I got one of these players for christmas from my parents. They’re certainly not hard to find here in the UK, mine came from Amazon.
Its a Phillips DVP 630 and cost around £65 (Roughly $125) IIRC and Im very impressed with it so far. It plays Divx/mpeg files without any bother, I was worried that it may need some special kind of disc formatting or directory structure, but it’ll happily read files burned straight onto an ordinary data CD.
Im no home cinema buff, put picture and sound quality is excellent and it has all the features you’d expect on any other DVD player. If you can find one of these I’d certainly reccomend it unless you’re looking for a very high end setup.
I checked Amazon USA and they don’t seem to stock this or any other divx player, but if you’re struggling to find one in the USA you could allways have one shipped over from the UK. The one I’ve got and others are available from many British online retailers, most of them are Multi region and NTSC compatible, but you will need a step up converter to run it from a 110v source. Postage wouldn’t be too prohibitive, but you might have to worry about import duty as well.
Here’s a handy search list for DivX (and other format) compatible DVD players…
I’d say it is better than watchable… I can make the 700 Mb version of the DVD virtually the same quality…
I use Gordian Knot. Basically for the audio I set it to 96 kb/sec average/variable bit rate (not constant bitrate), I have the image resolution very high (the width is at least the same as the original) and I use Divx Pro with encode performance set to “slow” and psychovisual enhancements enabled and set to slow and do 4 passes. That takes at least 12 hours to encode (in the background). There are also divx profiles for home theatre - because my settings might be a bit CPU intensive during playback.
Gordian knot also lets you use surround sound (AC3, etc) with divx I think, and you apparently can use 2 sound tracks (so you can have the commentary there too) - I haven’t tried it though. But the thing is that blank DVD’s are so cheap these days that there doesn’t seem much point putting divx onto CD’s. (It’s good if you want to just keep them all on your harddrive though)