New Fangled DVD technology

jimmyjames

I'm getting a DVD player. I'm looking for something that plays mpegs and comes out of the factory as multi region; none of that hacking them open and fiddling about with them.
Does anyone know if any play avi's and/or asf files as well?

It should also slice, dice, cook my dinner and wash up.


Any suggestions?

KdjaCL

richer sounds have a few multi region.
I ahve never got /seen/heard of anyone who bought one.
they 100€

dont thinnk they can play AVI but.

kdja

daveg

The Wharfdale dvd plays VCD'd (which is what your looking for). Richersounds I think are still stocking it. To play Mpeg's you will have to make a VCD. Avi's can be converted into Mpegs.

Go to http://www.vcdhelp.com

ShaneOC

Converting AVI's to MPEG's take quite an amount of time. If I remember correctly it's about 15 times realtime, i.e. a 3 minute avi video will take 45 minutes to convert to MPEG. A two hour movie will take about 30 hours.

Mutz

Crown DVD.

VCD, MPEG, AVI etc alot of stuff i've never heard of.

Region 2 :rolleyes:

€150 out of power city

Unfortunately it doesnt Cook Sausages.

Inspector Gadget

Originally posted by ShaneOC
Converting AVI's to MPEG's take quite an amount of time. If I remember correctly it's about 15 times realtime, i.e. a 3 minute avi video will take 45 minutes to convert to MPEG. A two hour movie will take about 30 hours.

This process is actually ENORMOUSLY dependent on the processing power and hard disk speed of your system, so it's really not possible to give an accurate estimate of how long it will take. However, you're looking at something that's slower than realtime, more likely than not.

On a separate note, I've never seen a DVD-player that plays AVIs; this is probably because AVI is simply an interleave mechanism that allows audio and video stream (each encoded by one of a huge variety of codecs) to be multiplexed/interleaved into a single overall "stream". DivX, for example, is a modified MPEG-4 video stream and either an MP3 or AC3 audio stream interleaved into an AVI! Basically, AVIs are too open-ended in terms of what you can actually put into them for it to be economically feasible to build dedicated decoders in hardware, as has been done with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (as used for VideoCD and DVD respectively).

The ASF/WMA formats have similar issues, compounded by the possibility of variable frame rates, which can cause havoc with the audio/video synchronisation if not carefully managed.

Another thing that might be useful is to ensure that your DVD player supports CD-Rs and/or CD-RW's; the optical frequency required in the laser used to play DVDs will play DVDs and silver (pressed) CDs fine, but will not read CD-Rs (and certainly not CD-RWs); for this you need that a dual-frequency laser pickup is installed, which you'll see on the player itself as "CD-R compatible" and/or "CD-RW compatible". Check what the player can read against what you plan to use in it. If you're converting AVIs to MPEGs to play on the DVD player a lack of support for one or both may limit your options.

(I'd also suggest visiting http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/info/multiregion/ to see what current players can be "region hacked" using the remote control)

Hope this helps,
Gadget.