OGM support Elta: Rumour?

[jkwarras]

Hi,

Apparently, the rumour that Elta will support OGM in their Elta 8883 is just an unfounded rumour, according to what I've read on this spanish thread on the site www.indicedivx.com (very serious site):

http://www.indicedivx.com/foro/showthread.php?threadid=23286&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

According to the Marketing Director of megacoolpc.es, which apparently work very closely to Ascomtec (DVD-DivX player based on the same chip that the Elta) this is just un unfounded rumour. Both Elta and Ascomtec receive the same support for the exactly same chips, and Ascomtec doesn't have any plans of supporting this feature. Furthermore, according to the Director of Ascomtec "What Elta could do Ascomtec will do, if not earlier at the same time"

This is the spanish text:

Aquellos que aseguran que el Elta leerá ogg, os aviso que es un rumor sin fundamento. Mediatek da a Elta y a Ascomtec EXACTAMENTE el mismo soporte para chips IDÉNTICOS. Palabras textuales del director general de Ascomtec: "Lo que Elta pueda hacer lo hará Ascomtec si no antes sí al mismo tiempo".

I don't know if anyone can confirm that, or have heard anything serious about that. It seems that all this rumours about OGM support are almost unfounded.

Regards

[Zhnujm]

I wouldnt expect anything else than a rumor until i see an ogm file playing on my elta. ;)
My general rule for such things is, dont buy a product that does not do everything you want, and dont trust anybody who is telling you this or that will work in the future. Its just not worth the trouble.

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by Zhnujm
I wouldnt expect anything else than a rumor until i see an ogm file playing on my elta. ;)
My general rule for such things is, dont buy a product that does not do everything you want, and dont trust anybody who is telling you this or that will work in the future. Its just not worth the trouble.

Sure. That's what I'm doing :) Just waiting for my "dream player": XCD-MKV, subtitles and MP3/Ogg. Maybe in two years, who knows? ;p

Anyway, it's amazing the way this DivX-players are getting better everyday. It's a shame that it "only" support avi, but it's normal as OGM and MKV are not really what people normally do (or download from the net, let's face it).

[CruNcher]

It's all in the Hand of MediaTek what their firmware will support in the future and in the Size of the flashrom but they could even take out other things or make them smaller for integrating other things would be nice if they opensource it sometime in the future but that's not gonna happen so fast sadly :(

[Zhnujm]

Originally posted by jkwarras
"What Elta could do Ascomtec will do, if not earlier at the same time"


I just tried the Ascomtec 3004 Firmware on the elta, its older and at first look it misses the color/brightness/and-so-on settings with RGB/YUV output, just as the elta with the first firmware.
So much for "What elta can do, ..." ;)

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by Zhnujm
So much for "What elta can do, ..." ;)

I hate all this marketing blabla :D

[ChristianHJW]

Sorry for 'raping' a OGM related thread, but please allow me to add these short comments :

We were contacted 4 times meanwhile, from different DivX player distributors and manufacturers, about adding matroska support to their units. Since then, nothing happened. 2 companies not even got in contact with us anymore after the first 'announcement' they will support us, the other 2 are at least still pretending they work on it. We know meanwhile its a lie, because we dont get any questions from their side, nor do they ask for support of any kind. And we know for sure they needed a lot of support, as we made a short validation of the effort it takes to implement EBML on hardware.

Now, when i read about companies wanting to add OGM support, like what the ELTA people told Doom9 several times already, i got this odd feeling again. Sure, supporting OGM on hardware would maybe be a bit easier from a technical point of view, but without real specs they had to reverse engineer what the mplayer or VLC people have done to support OGM ? Tobias' OggDS filters are based on libogg, and on hardware they needed to use Tremor, so dont believe you just do a copy and paste and here you go.

From my point of view, these great sounding announcements are nothing then only a clever marketing trick ! They spread this kind of information to give a potential buyer the impression he can expect a lot of firmware upgrades in future !!

It would be interesting if any standalone manufacturer would dare to publically announce a timeline about when new features will be supported. Maybe Doom9 can use his 'status' to ask them :D ? I doubt we will get any definite answers. Reality is, that not even AAC is supported yet .....

[jkwarras]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
We know meanwhile its a lie, because we dont get any questions from their side, nor do they ask for support of any kind.

That's a real shame :(

From my point of view, these great sounding announcements are nothing then only a clever marketing trick ! They spread this kind of information to give a potential buyer the impression he can expect a lot of firmware upgrades in future !!

That's also my feeling. I think that standalone manufacturers think that "liying" (or just pretend that in some future they will support something, but not actually clarifying any timing) to consumers will bring more buyers, and in fact i think that it does. People are buying those players juts because they hope that in the future they maybe support OGM or MKV, and subtitles and Vorbis, and so on, by firmware updates and continuous support. Standalone players will support AVI just because it's the most famous container, but the rest I don't feel that's going to happen very soon. Most of these firms are just taking advantage of non informed people that don't know anything about codecs/containers, encoding features (Qpel, GMC, and so on), sound compression formats, etc... just by putting "Play MPEG-4" or "DivX" into their boxes.

[amango]

Since the day I bought a DIVX standalone-player, I have stopped making OGM and MKV-files. It makes no sense to encode with those container formats, if they won't get supported.

[Doom9]

Here's what I got from elta regarding release-dates:

Der Chipsatz ist Media Tek 1389
WMA is built-in - WMA in AVI via Update within the next 4 weeks
Ogg - per update in February
DivX Video subtitel - yes
GMC in XviD - no - I can't tell you about when and how right now


That's from an email dated December 3rd. I have an offer to test the device but so far I haven't been able to prepare a test and I got sidetracked with DVB (something really new.. how can I go back to codecs I already know?).

[alexnoe]

The last mpeg4 player i asked someone to try my files on did not even recognise AVIs with 3 AC3 audio streams...maybe AVI files support should be decrapped (which is well specified) before trying unspecified formats likes OGM...

[Zhnujm]

They only talk about ogg, that can also mean only ogg audio.
If the players would support odml-avis >2gb, embedded subtitles and maybe some kind of chapter information (can such thing be stored in avi ?) there wouldnt be much need for other container formats.

[alexnoe]

There is a hack of the AVI format by Vidomi which includes chapter information, but the opendml-avi specification does not include any possibility to store chapter info