5punk

Righto techies. My PC is no longer going to be in my living room which is a good thing, but means I need to be able to watch my sweepings on my TV. I could convert them to DVD format, but it takes ages and takes up twice the DVD space as AVIs. If I get a DivX compatible DVD player will it play all AVI files, or is it more complicated than that? Connecting TV to PC just doesn't really work, so its AVIs or conversion to DVD only.

Lateralus wrote:If I get a DivX compatible DVD player will it play all AVI files, or is it more complicated than that?

Kinda and Yeah, in that order.

You should be fine for almost everything. Though it is possible to stop divx dvd players playing some xvid avis (it's a setting rippers can use that breaks stuff for some hardware players)

For general use, should be fine


If you want full compatibility, I'd suggest getting a chipped xbox with xbmc, that'll play everything well and allows for streaming over a network, which means no pissing about with dvds at all.

But how much am I looking at for that, cos I'm thinking ~£30 for a DivX DVD player.

When you say it breaks some hardware, is it properly broken, or just won't play that file?

more money than that, but it's a good option if you can pick one up cheap, also 'd gaems

It should just fail to play, might crash the player but nothing permanent

Lateralus wrote:But how much am I looking at for that, cos I'm thinking ~£30 for a DivX DVD player.

I've seen £25 inc delivery
Check out - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/sho ... ?p=4641223
You should be able to pick up an Xbox for £50, I did from GAME about 6 months ago. (with 4 controllers and IR!)
Modding can be done cheaply or for free, depends on your resources and friends and I'm with Berk, it's the nuts for watching media streamed straight off your network, no burning required.

I've done the whole cheap divx dvd player thing, and my experiences with it were horrible, as they always have issues displaying dark patches on screen, even with my new expensive panasonic home theatre system I have bought (tested it the other week out of interest)

Admittedly the Panasonic one played the divx files at a much better quality than the cheapo one I had years ago, but it's still pretty shit, so I'd make sure you read reviews before you go splashing out on one (all be it only £30).

Kiss are supposed to be the best make from memory when I looked into it a few years back, so maybe start looking at them first

you always risk this with AVIs.

however, a lot of the issues can be fixed with fettling the brightness/contrast.

It's also worth noting it'll show up worse on lcd/plasma screens, as they're far higher resolution and much clearer than a CRT

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:you always risk this with AVIs.

however, a lot of the issues can be fixed with fettling the brightness/contrast.

It's also worth noting it'll show up worse on lcd/plasma screens, as they're far higher resolution and much clearer than a CRT

Backl 4 years ago, this was on a CRT, a very big CRT I might add, but it wasn't a flat panel.

Berk is right however, you can fiddle with the settings to get it to look better, but anything substandard of a standard TV signal just isn't good enough in my book, and the other common problem is the sound going out of synch with the video feed, so everything goes into "Japanese dubbed kungfu flick mode"

Like I said, things may have moved on since then, but if you are aware of the potential issues, you can atleast google for them once you decide on a player

it's worth remembering the codecs are *MUCH* better now too.

Both xvid and divx are clean code (rather than stolen code as they were a few years ago) and have been worked on loads, the banding in dark scenes is basically gone now.