looking for the best playback -results...

[devilsripper]

Hello everybody!

Can anyone give me a hint on players?
I have a great collection of movies in all versions of divX (nearly).
Some (few) are in MP3-audio and most are in AC3-audio.
I my opinion DivXplayer (with the Bundle version) makes best picture results! But I don´t know how to make it play the ac3-audio... If nobody knows how to manage this I would be very pleased you give me some ideas of what player I should use.
I also think about making a great test of different players. Maybe you can read it in some days. But I think I should better try in german... my english is so bad..

greetings to all quality-fans!

Bastian

[Blight]

All the divx players have the SAME quality as they all go through the SAME decoder.

The question is a metter of quality with the playback interface.

As for AC3 playback, you need to have an AC3 decoder filter installed and an AC3 parser filter loaded. With both registered on your system, any DirectShow based player will play AVI with AC3.

I prefer Zoom Player myself, but since I'm it's author, I'm slightly biased.

[avih]

Originally posted by Blight
I prefer Zoom Player myself, but since I'm it's author, I'm slightly biased.

hehe ;)
powerdivx also does a good job with ac3 from what i hear.

cheers
avi.

[devilsripper]

... sure, the Decoder is the same, but there are differences in the Picture. This is my subjective feeling!
And the audiofilters are handeled very diffrent!
For exanple Windowsmediaplayer decodes AC3 with the intervideo-audiodecoder, DivX Player 2.0 Alpha does not! Win-DVD normally installs the intervideo-audiodecoder and uses it. Power DVD has its own decoder.
So I can say these players are directshow based players excluding DivX Player?
But we must not forget each System is diffrent. It would take too long to tell my Hard- and Software config. There is a screenshot of my standard-filter-combination from graphedit:

Would be nice to hear you again.

Bastian

P.S.: What do you mean with the playbackinterface? Maybe you have a site where I can read more about it?

[Flay]

Really, movie playback quality depends on system configuration.

Try Light Alloy, I'd really love your opinion about it:
http://lightalloy.softdepia.com/

[devilsripper]

I'm afraid I can't do that.
The link seems to be dead. But I'll try later again. Mabe it works tomorrow.

[Blight]

PowerDVD/WinDVD don't use DirectShow when playing AC3.
They do when playing DivX.

DivX player (one from divx.com) uses it's own AVI Parser and as such can have panic attacks with some codecs (like AC3 which was never really designed to be in an AVI file).

[diji1]

devilsripper : but there are differences in the Picture. This is my subjective feeling!

I have noticed quality differences on lower end systems using different players - so i'd assume that some players use ( significantly ) more resources than others during playback considering Blight's remarks regarding decoding. Of course everyones fave wmp ( hehe ) seems to be the biggest resource hog of all - if that's what it is that causes these playback differences. Perhaps I am wrong ...

Flay : Try Light Alloy, I'd really love your opinion about it

oooooohh! a new player ( well, new to me ) - i'll be trying this out soon! :D

Bsplay is my favourite btw. Why ? One word: options! :)

[Blight]

diji1:
I believe Zoom Player's option far outweigh bsplayer's...

[metalmania]

Blight, I use Zoom Player and Radlight player. I think Zoom player is great.

In my computer, BSplayer cannot play smoothly like Zoom player and Radlight.

However, I just don't like Vobsub, since vobsub subtitle files are usually bigger than 1M. I prefer subrip format (.srt). I can easily burn the 699M avi file and 100K subtitle file on one CD-R, but if with Vobsub...

Both Radlight and BSplayer support many subtitle format.

I think perhaps this is why people like BSplayer.

[diji1]

Blight : I believe Zoom Player's option far outweigh bsplayer's...

:D - perhaps i should have added then:

Zoomplayer is my second favourite. Why ? Two words: options and it plays my dvd. :)

[Blight]

metalmania:
I miss your point, VobSub plays .SRT file formatted subs...

diji1:
Just out of personal interest, why do you feel that bsplayer is better than ZP?

[metalmania]

Blight, I see. Thanks.

I just like the way that Radlight and BSplayer handle the subtitle,

it's easy to enable or disable the subtitle. Anyway, Zoom player is

my favorite.

[diji1]

blight : I believe Zoom Player's option far outweigh bsplayer's...

hi there blight : ok, thing is that i have 3 video players atm on my usual system atm: bsplay, powerdvd 3.0 ( does what i need ;) ) and zoomplayer. about a year or so ago i started to realise that wmp was just not up to scratch, so i hunted around for new players. so after much changing and trying out new players ( yours and lots of others ) about 6 months or so, i guess, i finally settled on bsplayer as my default player - mostly based on it's options and low cpu utilisation and i like the interface, except that a lot of skins including the default are too large for my taste, though the full screen controls with the new skins is excellent imo. another reason i chose bs was the ability to use divx 4 playback whilst still having 3.11;-) as the encoding codec still.

however, at the moment i'm really considering changing to your player. i tried zoomplayer again a little while back and was really impressed with how much had been added. another thing that really impresses me with zoom is the amount of times it is updated - man, do you ever sleep ? :). nothing against the author of bsplay in any way at all, but i really think that a program that gets updated so much ( zoomplayer ) deserves everyone's support, and bsplay updates have been few and far between, and alot of the improvements are just bug-fixes not additional useful features. i guess the only thing really holding me back is "user inertia" - so, here and now i say ill change to zoomplayer :)

i got so p*ssed with m$ windoze-resourcehog/spyware-player a few weeks ago that i deleted it from my xp partition - i never used it anyway nowadays ( in fact, i think IE is the only m$ app left on my xp partition, lol ) ... bsplay is next for the chop off my hdd ( all 1.58 megs of it, haha ).

So from a very recently converted zoomplayer user thankyou very much for the huge amount of work that you have put into the program.

[metalmania]

Hi, diji1, I have a question for you, hope you can help me.

I use the Radlight5.2, BSplayer486, and zoom player on my Dell Inspiron 8100.

As you know, I set the resolution at 1600x1200 with the Geforce2go 16M video card.
Both Radlight and Zoom player play well, but BSplayer cannot play smoothly, the picture always "jumps". If I set the resolution below 1024x768, BSplayer is fine.

Any idea? Thanks.

[diji1]

@metalmania : tried it ... bsplay is jumpy on my system also at over 1024 it seems ( geforce 3 ti200 ). i'd never actually noticed it before as i usually drop my resolution for full screen viewing on my pc - usually 800x600, can lead to smoother playback imo.

@blight : im loving zoomplayer :D ... i hunted around in the options and i couldn't find a place to adjust post-processing for divx. is there that option in ur player ? other than that though, a very worthy replacement to bsplay i have to say! options abound ... :)

[Zhnujm]

the only thing why i prefer bsplayer over ALL other players is that only bsplayer can play my 2 cd movies at 4x cdrom. all other players begin to stutter on high bitrate scenes (the cdrom seeks like crazy).

bsplayer must use a better buffering or read-ahead cache or whatever ??

[Blight]

BSPlayer has it's own video renderer and maybe even AVI parser.

Benefits:
Better control over the data (buffering?)

Problems:
Not 100% compatible and as people have noticed, has issues with high resolutions (and while I haven't tried bsplayer in like a year, when I did try it, in 16bit modes it had inferior image quality ... banding issues).

diji:
Hehe, good to see my subliminal code in ZP caused your mind to dislike all other players ;)

As for setting the DivX settings, two ways:
Press "D" to open the dialog, or right click the video, go over to filter properties and click on the DivX filter.

Zhnujm:
4x CDrom? You can probably get like a 40x CDRom just by going to a junkyard and looking for discarded computers.

[Zhnujm]

Originally posted by Blight

Zhnujm:
4x CDrom? You can probably get like a 40x CDRom just by going to a junkyard and looking for discarded computers.

well, speed is not the problem, i have 2 32x/6x toshiba dvds. but i like my playback-pc really silent (and i mean absolutely completely no noise) ;)

[diji1]

blight : "Hehe, good to see my subliminal code in ZP caused your mind to dislike all other players"

yep, can confirm subliminal code is working bug free and perfect :D. thanks for the answer ... dunno how i missed that before, duh me.

[Blight]

Zhnujm:
Then you should consider a media server with a big hard disk(s) to keep all the files on.

[Zhnujm]

that would be the perfect solution, but 2x Maxtor 160GB = 666 € :(
i think at this time bsplayer is cheaper :) (but in some time..)

[Beave]

There are programs out there that can throttle down your 40x Spinners. I use my Pioneer 16x DVD Player it is very loud by default. But when you search around on their Homepage they offer a tool to change the speed. For the lazy, get the attachement.

So I change to 8x and its totally quiet and plays every movie so far, and if not I could choose 12x and so on.

There is also a german program to throttle all sorts of CD-Drives. I think it costs something like 5 €. Look here: www.cd-bremse.de (http://www.cd-bremse.de)

[BlackSun]

Originally posted by avih


hehe ;)
powerdivx also does a good job with ac3 from what i hear.

cheers
avi.

from what you hear ? :D And my favorite is The Core Media Player :)

[Blight]

Tsk Tsk ... Self promotion ;)

[avih]

bs!
should i have written 'from what i READ' ?? ;)

i actually never play or deal with ac3 files, so i have zilch experience with it, and indeed, other ppl claim it does a good job with it ;), i just 'propagated' that 'knoledge' ;)

keep working and don't mind the smalltalks around you ;)
lol

best regards
avi

[BlackSun]

Originally posted by Blight
Tsk Tsk ... Self promotion ;)

ehehe, I can say the same with you ;)

[gunnimabi]

:o Hey, devilsripper, what you really need is WinDVD,use the professional one, the best video player in the world. You can download WinDVD 4.0 from the Free Download Area of www.jummpa.com