building commercial divx/xvid player

[tobo99]

I research a bit for a smaller hardware company, they plan to make a standalone divx player. My company has made several dvd players, tvs and hifi equipment before so production is of no concern. The chinese factory they work with can currently support divx 3 and 4, they can't make 5 until Q4 this year. My question is, will it support Xvid? as Xvid is becomming the most common codec used in movies available for download on the net (i know this ain't a warez forum but this is what people do and there is a market for players just for this cause). Is there a market for a divx 3 & 4 player now or are people demanding 5 & xvid? Note that this concerns the large mass of poeple, not the kind of people that go here. The chip in these players will be closed so no firmware upgrade can be done to the codecs, what happens when xvid movies uses new features not supported by the codec chip?

I direct these questions to all you guys on this board that are so much better at these things than me...

Thanks!

[Blight]

the chip should support mpeg4 advanced simple profile, MP3 decoding, vorbis decoding, ogg and avi parsing (and MPEG4 ISO parsing if you really want to be future-proof).

This will get you best coverage, although, some XVID settings may be out of the spec, so you may want to run tests.

[Top_Cat]

If you are able to support Divx 3.11alpha then you will be one step ahead of the competition (at the moment). Without being able to upgrade the firmware though seems like you might find it difficult to convince a lot of people to buy it rather than the Kiss player (unless it is cheaper of course).

I think you should also ensure that it will playback DVD's as I think the market for just a Divx player with no DVD playback could be limited.

If you ensure that the chip supports Mpeg4 you should be able to playback Divx 5 as well :)

[rakaz]

Hi tobo99,

Based on my own experiences the following things should definately be supported if I were to buy a standalone divx/xvid player:

MPEG-4 Simple profile:
which would allow you support for DivX 4, partial DivX 5 and partial Xvid.

MPEG-4 Advanced Simple profile:
which would allow you full support for DivX 5 and Xvid. Releasing a hardware player which isn't upgradable and which doesn't support the Advanced Simple profile is simply releasing a player which is already out-of-date. Lack of support will definately make me look elsewhere.

MSMPEG4:
which would allow you support for DivX 3. Although most users nowadays use DivX 4/5 or Xvid this is still pretty important to me. I have a lot of older DivX 3 files which I want to be able to play. Lack of support for DivX 3 is the main reason I didn't buy a KISS player.

MP3:
which would allow you audio support for most of the currently available movies

AVI container:
which would allow you to play most of the currently available movies

MP4 container:
which would allow you to play real MPEG-4 files.


The following things would 'seal the deal' for me:

AAC:
which would allow you support the default audio format for real MPEG-4 files. Currently this codec isn't used that much, but especially if you do not plan to offer upgrading the firmware, lack of support for this would make me think twice before buying your player.

Vorbis and Ogg:
which would allow you support .ogm files which are currently used in combination with Xvid. This combination is becoming more and more populair and definately a great feature.


Without saying the following are also required: DVD playback (and mini-DVD), VCD playback, SVCD playback and MP3 CD playback.

[tobo99]

thanks for your input. To clear a few things up, ofcourse the player will have all the usual dvd functions as dvd/vcd/svcd/mp3/maybe even jpg playback. The price wouuld be very aggressive, something like 99-129$ (although this would be in sweden). As i understand it, they don't support MPEG4 Advanced Simple Profile yet, this would be a function they (the chinese building these players) manage to add in Q4 this year. Is it worth to produce a player like that now and ship it this summer and then make a new model shipping hopefully before christmas?

[mf]

Originally posted by rakaz
Without saying the following are also required: DVD playback (and mini-DVD)
Which would also mean it should support AC3 from AVI/MP4/OGM.