Bill_st
22nd October 2004, 12:00
I got this player with DivX capabilities almost for free a few weeks ago, I'd never had bought it, and while being ok for playing DVDs it is cheap and has lots of glitches when playing AVIs or other material. It uses an ESS Vibrato II chipset if I'm not mistaken. Here are my questions.
1. Anyone has this player and knows of a firmware update? After searching a while on the www.audioscott.com I've only found an update for the i800 model, and mine's an i820. It is strange that having so many glaring issues there isn't a firmware update so far.
2. It seems that when I set the interleaving parameters for an AVI what works well in my PC doesn't work well with the player. If I set anything over 0ms of audio preload the audio is ahead of the video by the same amount throughout the movie, and if I use 96ms/96ms for a 448 kbps AC3 track, the sound will skill once or twice a minute. It looks like 0-5ms preload/1 video frame are the settings that seem to work best (no asynch, no stutter), but they look very weird compared to the 96/96 / 128/128 numbers that I see everywhere for AC3 tracks. Can anyone tell me why both numbers are usually the same, and how bad is it to use 5ms/1 video frame?
3. No matter what codec I use, when playing AVIs most of the times it will skip to the first i-frame in the movie (first i-frame after frame 0, that is). I'm inserting a couple of blank seconds in front of the movies to avoid skipping the first 2-10 seconds of the movie due to this bug, any thoughts on why it would do this, or a better way to deal with it?
4. It seems that the Divx certification logo on the box means nothing, because unless I deactive profiles in the encoder settings and limit the max bitrate below 3000-3200 kbps there will be stuttering/chokes in fast moving scenes when I use the Home Theater Profile. I'm trying to get it to work with the XviD encoder using both AS@L5 and AS@L4 but as soon as the average bitrate is a little higher than 1200 kbps the video will stutter in fast moving scenes, so I assume the encoder uses way too high bitrates for my player (all other options set to conservative settings, no Qpel, no GMC, only 1 BVOP). If the video is encoded with lower aver. bitrates, like 800-100 kbps, it seems to work ok, but obviously it looks worse than a DivX encoded with 1400-1500. For what I read in several places it has something to do with the VBV included in the DivX encoder and supposedly not found in the XviD encoder. Is it true? Can anything be done to limit the max bitrate anyway? I'd really prefer to use Xvid over Divx for quality sake, but so far I'm locked out due to the inability to prevent spikes.
1. Anyone has this player and knows of a firmware update? After searching a while on the www.audioscott.com I've only found an update for the i800 model, and mine's an i820. It is strange that having so many glaring issues there isn't a firmware update so far.
2. It seems that when I set the interleaving parameters for an AVI what works well in my PC doesn't work well with the player. If I set anything over 0ms of audio preload the audio is ahead of the video by the same amount throughout the movie, and if I use 96ms/96ms for a 448 kbps AC3 track, the sound will skill once or twice a minute. It looks like 0-5ms preload/1 video frame are the settings that seem to work best (no asynch, no stutter), but they look very weird compared to the 96/96 / 128/128 numbers that I see everywhere for AC3 tracks. Can anyone tell me why both numbers are usually the same, and how bad is it to use 5ms/1 video frame?
3. No matter what codec I use, when playing AVIs most of the times it will skip to the first i-frame in the movie (first i-frame after frame 0, that is). I'm inserting a couple of blank seconds in front of the movies to avoid skipping the first 2-10 seconds of the movie due to this bug, any thoughts on why it would do this, or a better way to deal with it?
4. It seems that the Divx certification logo on the box means nothing, because unless I deactive profiles in the encoder settings and limit the max bitrate below 3000-3200 kbps there will be stuttering/chokes in fast moving scenes when I use the Home Theater Profile. I'm trying to get it to work with the XviD encoder using both AS@L5 and AS@L4 but as soon as the average bitrate is a little higher than 1200 kbps the video will stutter in fast moving scenes, so I assume the encoder uses way too high bitrates for my player (all other options set to conservative settings, no Qpel, no GMC, only 1 BVOP). If the video is encoded with lower aver. bitrates, like 800-100 kbps, it seems to work ok, but obviously it looks worse than a DivX encoded with 1400-1500. For what I read in several places it has something to do with the VBV included in the DivX encoder and supposedly not found in the XviD encoder. Is it true? Can anything be done to limit the max bitrate anyway? I'd really prefer to use Xvid over Divx for quality sake, but so far I'm locked out due to the inability to prevent spikes.