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shevegen
8th September 2004, 07:05
Hi,
well, maybe this would belong to the General board, but then again i find it slightly more suited to have it posted here, as a central part of this post is the avi container format, which i'd like to diss in favour of another format (a better one!).


The situation is that several months ago I bought a MPEG-4 standalone player, it was rather cheap. Then few months later it started to produce odd noise while playing back DVDs (which then resulted in stopping to play the DVD after several breaks.. breaks you get like with scratched DVDs) so i sent it to get it repaired while buying another one, slightly more expensive (oh jesus...).


Now, those two players playbacked .avi files quite nicely, but the more expensive player annoys me with some messages like 'cant playback audio format' (was AC3) or cant playblack this combination blabla. Rather annoying, especially as it was really easy on my machine to play pretty everything thanks to mplayer/kplayer xine and so forth. And it was a rather cheap AMD as well so .... ;)

Anyway, the point was that I just then really REALIZED that even some of the better encoded (Xvid, 2 pass, quite high filesize) movies I did encode myself werent of a really good quality - well, ok, standards may be different but this was my perception now.
My subjective point of view was that some of the block errors were more annoying than VHS playback heh heh. And of course there were those REALLY annoying situations when the player refused to play some alternative audio, or just MPG files (Hrm...).

So now to my question:

- I want to playback Videos from a container on one of those old and fat 'normal' tv's ... well blocky ones with the big television screens without having to rely on a 3rd party standalone player that is limited so much. I imagine I could use an old computer to 'serve' like a standalone player does, but I am not sure what modification would be necessary (if any that is).

Koepi
8th September 2004, 09:47
Your post gets a little confusing to the end - you want to build a PC for not relying on a standalone player and want to use something else than avi?

If you use a PC for playback you can simply stick with avi or use whatever container you like. It's just a matter of setting up your VGA cards TV out.

For standalone player compatibility I'd recommend good old avi with mp3 sound - that'll work like charme and you don't have to wait for a long-promised firmware update supporting different containers.

Also, if you use xvid, make sure not to use features your standalone player can't decode (i.e. GMC will result in visible block artefacts like you seem to have experienced on some chipsets not supporting 3-warppoint-gmc.)

Regards
Koepi

therealjoeblow
4th October 2004, 18:47
Originally posted by shevegen
So now to my question:

- I want to playback Videos from a container on one of those old and fat 'normal' tv's ... well blocky ones with the big television screens without having to rely on a 3rd party standalone player that is limited so much. I imagine I could use an old computer to 'serve' like a standalone player does, but I am not sure what modification would be necessary (if any that is).

See my thread in the hardware forum entitled "Build your own standalone"

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72918&highlight=build+your+own+standalone

It's got all the details on everything you need (of course, when configuring the software, use the latest versions over those specified - the hardware noted is all basically 'recycled' , low-end stuff and should still work fine with current formats)...

Disabled
4th October 2004, 20:24
Or go buy a Xbox. Its cheap, has all you need, you can build in a 300GB hd, has network support, remote controllable - all you need and more.
The only downside is, you have to mod it. Visit www.xbox-scene.com for further information and read their forums.
*edit* Another downside: The DVD-Rom used in the Xbox will most probably read CDrs only with a (if not done properly, risky) laser adjustment.

Cyberman
8th October 2004, 16:36
Originally posted by shevegen
- I want to playback Videos from a container

What´s the container got to do with it? It doesn´t have any impact on quality at all.

Beside that, use Matroska.