I am thinking about buying Divx dvd player that plays Avi files as I am running out of room with dvd's and would like to be able to burn the files directly to dvd instead of converting them with convertxtodvd. If anybody has one of these players could you comment on the quality and do they all play without sync issues. Any help would be appreciated.
I recently purchased a Philips dvp 5990 player. I had 2 players prior to this one that could play .avi files. A Philips dvp 642 and an Oppo. Both of the old players, if you played an .avi file and hit the Stop button, playback would retreat to the start of the file. You had to remember to hit Pause. With this Philips 5990 the Stop button works just like it does playing a regular DVD. It has Ultra Divx support for menus and whatnot. Also it handles subtitles much better. On my old players often I had to convert the avi in AviDemux to get it to play in the dvd player. This player is very tolerant of avi files. Now as a matter of course if I see it has a packed bitstream I'll load the file in AviDemux and then just save it as Unpacked Vop. In the AviDemux Edit=>preferences=>automation tab just check off all the options. Loading a file and saving is very fast.. a few minutes for a full length movie. The player also does upconversion if you get an HDMI cable for it. Plus it has a USB 2.0 connector so you can play files right off an external drive or key drive. The other nice thing is it will play .wmv 9 video files too!! The only thing really lame is the remote. It's a flimsy brittle black plastic box that's uncomfortable to hold. If you can get one of the old silver Philips remotes use it instead. The one from my dvp 642 works with it so I use that. For around $60 it's tough to beat. If you want to get the HDMI cable buy one online or else you're likely to pay almost as much for the cable as the player. For other leads you can go to www.divx.com for a list of compliant players but if you look in stores like Best Buy or Walmart the Philips is probably the best that's generally available. The other thing is go to www.videohelp.com and look at the list of remote hacks. You can easily set this player to region 0. Plus it handles both PAL and NTSC formatted DVDs.
I agree with MilesAhed, Philips is a great brand. I have one of their Divx players with Ultra Divx and it has played everything I have thrown at it, all kinds of variable bitrate/resolution avi and mpegs.
It's not just the remote, the silver one I have is also pathetic, the unit itself is beyond flimsy it's so cheaply made. There are also very few picture adjustments. They do play all the Xvids I've ever tried in it though.
I have one and I love it. I have no issues with picture quality, but then again I still have a regular TV. I'll post my test results here, but they are also on the player's review page. See my test results: Everything listed here was tested with 2GB and 4GB flash drives... Will not play a .mov file, but it will play the file if it is renamed with a .avi or a .mp4 extension and both audio and video streams are supported. Apparently it will not play an AAC audio file or audio stream within a video file if bitrate info is missing, or if it uses an ADTS muxing mode. One or both of these are true, could not isolate which. Does not play MJPEG video [like from a Kodak digital camera], but it does play the 88.2 Kbps 11.025 KHz LPCM audio stream within a MJPEG .avi file. Did not play the H.264 stream within an .avi or mp4 container, but it did play the AAC stream. Played several AAC files created by iTunes, all encoded at various bitrates and sample rates [41 & 48 KHz, 96-192 KHz] Does play WMV 9 with WMA 9.2 audio Does play .MPG MPEG 1 video with MPEG audio Does not play .MKV file with x264 codec Plays WMA and MP3. If you have any questions about certain formats, bitrates, aspect ratios etc., post them here.
Thanks hobbes for the technical information there. I am sure it is going to help a lot of people wanting to know exactly what will and will not play.
H0bbes, have you tried converting the .mkv files to .avi or any other format to play on that device. I just happen to have the same exact player as yours and I was wondering if that could be possible. Like MilesAhed said that it 'does upconversion if you get an HDMI cable' to 1080p. I have this player connected through HDMI to a 1080p tv and I was thinking if converting .mkv to .avi and playing it with an external drive, will it work?
I have converted mkv files to XviD avi's, but I have not yet tried the converted files on my player. I'll try it out, and post the results, sometime in between my kids and three jobs haha! I'm on a PC away from my house & can't remember details, but I think I have some Buffy The Vampire Slayer [I know, I know...] 720p mkv files at home. I'm going to try to convert them to DivX and DivX HD avi's and see if they play. If they do, my question will be if the original resolution, HD or otherwise, is preserved during playback when played through HDMI. I realize the player upconverts DVD's, but are video files treated the same way? I may try to take it to the electronics dept of my workplace and test it on a HDTV. As far as the hard drive, I have not yet tried it, but according to Philip's website it can access FAT16 and FAT32 hard drives. Here's part of a review from Amazon: "This is a fantastic player which most certainly does play PAL discs without a problem. There is also a superb modified firmware available at videohelp.com which gives longer filenames and some other interface improvements. The person who claims they had trouble getting discs out of the thin tray and lost discs into the player is...shall we say...less than truthful. It is impossible to push discs into the guts of the player without tripping the door close sensor. Even so, the tray will retract and the disc will fall into the recessed portion of the tray. The cover is held on with screws. How tough would it be to remove the cover if you needed to do so? Not very. I suppose you could turn the unit upside down and shake it to dislodge the disc from the tray. The player is designed for use under regular gravity and in a somewhat stable physical location. MP3 and WMA support is very good, supporting up to about 650 MP3s per directory. The USB port is in the front which is convenient but somewhat ugly, to be honest. For homemade data discs, I recommend using the freeware program FolderSort (Windows) as the files are sorted by the raw 8.3 format which does not always give the same order as the long filenames." I have a 160 GB and a 1TB I'm going to try with the USB port. I'll post the results here when I get a chance.
Ok, so I decided not to try my 1TB external- I'd have to format it as a FAT32 and have nowhere to temporarily store 700+ GB of data. I did test my 160 GB external with the 5990 DVD player, but I did have to format it to FAT32. I worked like a charm! It listed all the directories, including hidden, and played an XviD file. File specs, from MediaInfo Complete name : G:\Downloads\NCIS Season 3 Complete\NCIS-3x03.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 349 MiB Duration : 41mn 12s Overall bit rate : 1183 Kbps Writing application : VirtualDub Video Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : Simple@L3 Format settings, BVOP : Yes Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default Muxing mode : Packet Bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 41mn 12s Bit rate : 1006 Kbps Width : 624 pixels Height : 352 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16/9 Frame rate : 23.976 fps Resolution : 8 bits Colorimetry : 4:2:0 Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.191 Stream size : 297 MiB (85%) Writing library : XviD 1.1.0 Beta1 (UTC 2005-01-16) Audio Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 3 Codec ID : 55 Codec ID/Hint : MP3 Duration : 41mn 12s Bit rate mode : Variable Bit rate : 164 Kbps Nominal bit rate : 161 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Resolution : 16 bits Stream size : 48.5 MiB (14%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.58 video frame) Interleave, preload duration : 196 ms Writing library : LAME3.90. Encoding settings : ABR I still have to test the mkv file after I convert it to an XviD.
Glad to know the external drives will work. I just tried my USB key drive with a piece of an .avi I chopped with AviDemux for the test. I put the same avi clip on an erasable dvd. My TV is 1080i and it allowed me to select 1080i in HDMI options while playing the key drive. Looked exactly the same as the clip on the disc. From what I've seen so far this player does a great job with avi/xvid including handling .divx files with subtitles. According to the manual the restrictions on the USB port are no editing or saving .mp3, and the drive needs to be formatted Fat32(or at least it says NTFS is a no no.) So far the only feature I miss from previous players is single stepping. I haven't figured out how to advance a single frame. It does have slowmo that you can click down pretty slow.. but not quite the same. Generally my experience has been that xvid files that look good on the PC look good in the player. I do much less converting of avi to dvd with this player. It's much less finicky than my dvp 642. It doesn't crap out just because there's a few bvops in the .avi file.
Let me correct and clarify myself on one thing. I said earlier that all the directories on the hard drive were listed by the player. They are, meaning the directories on the root of the drive. Apparently there is a limit to how many sub-directories that are listed. For instance: ROOT>Artist>Album>song.mp3 will be displayed ROOT>Genre>Artist>Album>song.mp3 will not be displayed, because in this case the "Album" directory will not show. I guess this is not too big of a deal, but it is a little inconvenient to work around. I wanted to have folders on the root, such as "Music", "Videos", "Photos" and so forth, then have sub-directories with Artist/Album and Show/Season#, etc. Long shot...I wonder if a USB hub would work? It does say "USB 1" on the display... naahh, not gonna happen... Gonna try it anyway! Later!
Crap, it didn't work...lol. Without freezing or any hesitation, almost as if I was being mocked: "USB Hub Not Supported". HUH? So basically it knows what a hub is, but won't use it. That's hilarious. Wow. I did convert an mkv file to XviD. The video file played fine, but not the audio...my own fault. I forgot to check the AAC audio stream first to see if bitrate info was there [if that's the exact problem...still not sure]. Back to the drawing board...
I found a killer FAQ put together here: http://techflaws.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/philips-dvp3260-5990-faq/ It's pretty comprehensive, especially on hard drive/USB support.
