Fun new tech toys and anime AVI files

I have been playing around with a lot of new toys, and I would like to share some of my findings with those other anime fans who might not yet be aware of some of the new tech toys that are out there. I started my experience buy splurging and buying a big HD-LCD TV (which uses the same technology as the LCD computer monitors). I first tried to use it as a replacement for my 20inch LCD computer monitor, but with disastrous results. Try imagining staring into a 32 inch (almost one meter wide) computer monitor at a distance of less than one meter. Computer monitors are very square, while HD TVs are very wide. Maybe I am a bit of a luddite, but the setup did not work at all for me, but I did set it up a bit differently and now I am very happy with the results.

After chatting with Forbin for a bit, he made me aware of a series of new DVD players, which have as a standard feature - embedded DIVX codecs (or decoders), which will permit one to play (DIVX encoded) AVI files straight from a DVD or CD to a TV.

Forbin speaks fondly about his Philips Amazon.com wonder, with an analog output, which can jack straight into a TV or a cable TV feed. (Let’s hope he will chime in to share his opinion.)

Here is a short (tech-notes) description of some the features of the Philips DVP642 unit.

Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player (list price of $61.99 at Amazon.com)

PAL-to-NTSC format conversion--great for viewing non-region-encoded European discs Measures 17.1 x 1.7 x 9.3 inches (W x H x D) Plays DVD-Video, video CD, audio CD, JPEG image CD, and CDs loaded with MP3, MPEG-4, or DivX 3.11/4.x/5.x files Progressive-scan output for seamless, flicker-free images on HD-ready TVs; SmartPicture and 4x video upsampling enhance all outputs Optical and coaxial digital-audio terminals pass Dolby Digital and DTS surround signals

I did some research on the web and stumbled across a very fun and fancy HD-DVD player offered by a new company (located in Palo Alto) called OPPO. While the unit that they offer might be about 3X more expensive that the Philips unit, what turned me is that has a fully-digital connection (DVI interface) between the DVD player and the HD TV and WOW!! What a fun unit I chanced to pick up. It works great with my LCD HD-TV and I think that it will be great with any HD-plasma display.

My only lament is that I am going to now cough up some $ for a decent set of surround sound speakers to hook up to this DVD player, just to take advantage its great speaker support.

Being able to play AVI files (burned at 24+ episodes per DVD) directly on this DVD player is just great, and it can read/play XVID encodes files. Additionally, I was amazed to find out that OPPO also offers free software downloads (which have to be burned off to a CD) which support/allow for upgrades or updates for any bug-fixes or any new features or drivers that might come along in the next few years. (Ya just gotta love flash-rom technology!)

What surprised me is that this is on the tech-talk web site that I visited, the OPPO DVD playe was highest rated DVD player of the 25 units that they reviewed. And the 2nd rated unit was a Sony DVD player priced at (like) more than $2000. Do the math for yourself! But I am very happy with the OPPO unit that I purchased, (but with the understanding that you WILL HAVE to read the users manual just to set unit up correctly.)

Here are the details for the unit that I bought about six weeks ago….

OPPO OPDV971H - DIVX DVI DVD Player (list price of about $200) http://www.oppodigital.com/

DVI (Digital Video Interface) output to eliminate flickers and to produce more clear pictures High resolutions include 480p, 540P, 576p, 720p, 1080i Up Convert from 480i to 720p/1080i DCDi by Faroudja. Video is analyzed on a single pixel granularity to detect presence or absence of angled lines and edges, which are then processed to produce a smooth natural looking image without visible artifacts (jaggies) Plays DivX® 5, DivX® 4, DivX® 3, and DivX® VOD video content (in compliance with DivX Certified™ technical requirements) Plays XviD and .SRT, .SMI, .IDX and .SUB formats Per-pixel Motion Adaptive De-interlacing Patented FilmMode Processing C Used for proper de-interlacing of 3:2 and 2:2 pull down material

Functions: DVD Video/Audio, Divx/MPEG4, VCD, SVCD, CD, HDCD, WMA, DVDR/RW, CD-R/RW, Kodak Picture Super Error Correction with Twin Laser and Intelligent Laser Wavelength Control PAL / NTSC discs Automatic Screensaver Parental Control Function Menu Driven Setup Screen

Video: 108MHz/12bit Video D/A Converter DVI Output NTSC / PAL Output Screen Aspect Ratio 4:3 and 16:9 Smart Video: Sharpness/Contrast/Brightness/Saturation Multi-Angled View Multi-Language for On-Screen-Display

Audio: 192 KHz Sampling Frequency, 24-Bit High Quality Audio DAC Dolby Digital Down-mixed 2-Ch Stereo (L. R) Built-in Dolby digital Decoder, Dolby Digital (AC3) 5.1 Channel Output Built-in DTS Digital Decoder, DTS 5.1 Channel Output Dolby Digital/DTS/LCPM Bitstream Output 3D Surround (Virtual Surround): Concert, Live, Dance, Techno, Classic, Soft

Connectors: Analog (Mixed 2 Ch) Stereo (Left, Right) Audio S/PDIF (IEC-958) Coaxial/Optical Digital Audio Component Video/Composite Video/S-Video DVI (Bonus - 5' DVI-D cable included) 5.1 Channel Audio

Enjoy……….. Jan-chan

Oh.. FYI .. a wood-elf told me that if you download and try to view Anime-Destiny's fansub release of Full_Metal_Panic!TSR-0186EE80D1, it probably will not play correctly. You will need to load in some new codecs, which can be found at http://www.animetorrents.com/x264/.

I'm using such a DivX/XviD capable player for a year now, and although it frequently takes two attempts to read a disk I'm quite happy with it. My own model is a Hiteker drive (Dutch manufacturer); recently we bought a DivX/XviD-capable DVD player from Yakumo (Japanese?) for about 65 US $, in use with another TV set here, and probably on par with the Philips device you mentioned.

Checklist: Burn your own rewritable DVD with one video each of DivX 5 and XviD, placed in separate directories of a data disk format. Take this DVD to the shop and check whether your target player can play this disk. Don't trust any labels like "MPEG4 supported", they can mean a lot of very different things (some don't play XviD, some don't even read directory structures). And if you're watching anime fansubs, be aware that XviD is currently becoming more and more popular, many of the recent releases are using it, thus DivX5 alone might not suffice.

It might also be a good idea to check the maximum display capability of the player. My 12 months old Hiteker machine can't play 800*480 px videos whereas it can play 720*400 px videos. I've seen 800*480px fansubs already, and I'll have to convert them to some lower format doing a DivX re-encode before watching them on my TV set.

Another interesting test might be whether the DVD player plays MP3 audio streams with variable bitrates. Older DVD players tend to have problems with these (either play them with delays, or not at all), thus you'd have to extract and recompress the audio stream to a MP3 CBR stream (constant bit rate).

172 MB fansub files are meant to allow 26 episodes per DVD (26 * 172 = 4472 MB). Older fansubs often used 175 MB per episode (4 episodes per 700 MB CD) resp. 233 MB per episode (3 episodes on a 700 MB CD); I've recompressed some of the 233 MB files to 172 MB as to have only one DVD per series (the difference in quality is acceptable for me). High Quality fansubs recently started to use 344 MB per episode, thus 13 episodes would fit on one DVD.

As for audio quality, not many fansubs support 5.1 so far, but some do (often using the AC3 audio codec). Unfortunately many of these use Matroska video containers which are not yet supported by customary standalone DVD players, so you have to split those containers and put the streams into an old AVI container.

Originally I found the idea of installing additional codecs into my DVD player appealing. Given the current prices, I prefer purchasing a new cheap device every two years or so. In the long run, it will be a PC with a TV-out card connected to the TV set; there are customized PCs with mini cases suitable for this purpose already, they're just not cheap enough.

I'd like to know the delay time of your LCD TV (I'll probably purchase one myself later this year). Doing the maths, a 12 ms delay would equal a 83hz frequency of the old tube devices. Does your LCD TV display fast movements without "grease" effects?

The Anime-Destiny fansub is using a format named "H264/AVC" (white paper: http://www.vcodex.com/h264.html) which isn't exactly a codec; it is more like a new "MPEG5", while DivX and XviD both are implementations of MPEG4 format interpreters. It will probably take a long time until this new format will be supported by customary players. (The Videolan player on Windows already supports this format.)

As for softsubs, both SRT and SMI have been popular some time ago but don't support any reasonable features (such as fonts, colors, angles, movements, fadings etc. - for example, if you want to sub some Kanjis displayed on a house or in a letter within an anime scene, you need three-dimensional angles for the subtitle, and probably fonts & colors as well to make the appearance reasonable). If I'd ever purchase a player because of its softsub capability the absolute minimum required would be support for SSA/ASS format (SubStation Alpha). IDX and SUB aren't softsub formats IIRC, they're pixel images already.

I love my DVP-642 except for one thing. No Upgrades. Nada. Zip. I have been finding a few files that it won't play so I'm going to look for some different brands.

ATM I'm using a Initial IM-730DX (From Walmart of all places). It's a portable player (With 7in screen) that will play Divx, but it does seem to not play XVid, (Dokoru-Chan 3-4 keeps freezeing up after 30 seconds). So I'm looking to see if there is an upgrade, if not I'll return it. But it does make converting AVI's to DVD REALLLLLLY easy. Plug straight into a DVDrecorder and you have a superior way of converting AVI's to DVD without all the hassle and the issues of Sound sync you get from the conversion programs.