DVD Players That Play .avi Files?

[Dubversion]

depends which player you buy.

but in theory, these are all playable? i'm just trying to get a feel for what players can play, rather than necessarily what each of the models DO play, if you see what i mean

 

[RaverDrew]

I got a cheapo sub £30 one and it plays pretty much anything I throw at it, bar wmv and .h264.

 

[Allan]

http://www.savastore.com/productinf...vastore&product_id=10291825&pid=0&rstrat=7411

Thanks, Drew.

 

[Dubversion]

I got a cheapo sub £30 one and it plays pretty much anything I throw at it, bar wmv and .h264.

ok, cool.. so if i head up to Tottenham Court Road and get one, do you reckon the players will have lists of supported formats on the packaging (i take it as a given the shop staff won't have a fucking clue )

 

[Dubversion]

gonna get this one in Currys tonight i think - £34

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-SD260E-DVD-Player/dp/B000EW756Q

 

[rhod]

What about one of these external HDD enclosures with video outputs? Chuck in an old hard disk & transfer your AVI (or any other) files over. Plug in to telly & watch. Cost £35'ish. No waiting for any disks to be burned!

I've got one on order from eBay - let you know if it's any good

 

[Dubversion]

got the DVD player on Saturday and it's made me very fucking happy indeed. Scores of movies and series that i've built up over the last couple of years that i was dreading having to convert, all ready to watch

 

[Elvis Parsley]

we got one just after we moved house, fab aren't they. don't know why we waited so long

i was getting sick of burning dvd-r movies with audio sync problems, so this is a great alternative. we can download and watch a film the same night. very

 

[Dubversion]

yeh, it's just a bloody joy. Converting a whole 13-part US series took bloody ages, now you can burn it in 5 minutes.

Supercool

 

[pk]

A lot of this depends on the software they're bundled with, same as computers really.

Witth most units there are upgrade codes that are released, these are often a series of remote IR commands, sent from the manufacturer, and only an approved dealer is suppoed to be able to give out upgrades, region-cracking and that kind of thing.

If the machines are able to be equipped with the correct software codecs, they will play most things.

This is a good place to look for machines capable of modification - it's a case of chasing firmware for a bit but it's all out there - for free...

http://www.dvdlibrary.co.uk/latest_developments.htm

 

[pk]

gonna get this one in Currys tonight i think - £34

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-SD260E-DVD-Player/dp/B000EW756Q

Can't go wrong for £34 notes!

 

[dlx1]

I have three yamada you can update the freamware. Starting price £18
only down side they only last about 10 - 14 months

Up date ware

6100
6600

This is my next play Samsung DVD-HD860

 

[pk]

I have three yamada you can update the freamware. Starting price £18
only down side they only last about 10 - 14 months

I always thought Yamada machines were a bit of Asian humour... if you read the name aloud in an Asian accent it sounds like "your mother".

 

[Radar]

also be worried that it quite posibly won't play all avi files as avi can actully mean lots of diffrent file types (consider it a bit like a zip file for video the files is .zip but the contents may be anything)

When I bought mine, I went through my collection, figured out what codecs I needed supporting and burnt a test DVD with one of each possible combo of video and audio (Think I used mpeg divx5 divx5.1 divx 6 for video, and AC3 or MP3 for audio) I burnt this test DVD on DVD-R and DVD+R, hot footed it down to currys and spent a good hour and a half checking out as many of their display models as I could blag remotes for

If you've got a large and varied collection, it might be worth trying some variant of this.

 

[Dubversion]

Whereas I went for the 'fuck it, it plays DivX and it's cheap' approach and it hasn't let me down yet

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

actully i now play anime on my creative vision m ....

compleatly over the top but somehow cool


as for watching shit.... i have a 20" or 22" monitor ..... why do i need to watch it elsewhere?

 

[Radar]

Whereas I went for the 'fuck it, it plays DivX and it's cheap' approach and it hasn't let me down yet

And it cost you a third the price of mine, you bastard I've had mine for a while though, so nahh

 

[Dubversion]

i never did follow up that thing we discussed, radar, because i'm a useless flake.

 

[Radar]

i never did follow up that thing we discussed, radar, because i'm a useless flake.

No worries, my next door neighbour is using it again

 

[Dubversion]

cool, long as it's not a-wastin'

 

[rhod]

What about one of these external HDD enclosures with video outputs? Chuck in an old hard disk & transfer your AVI (or any other) files over. Plug in to telly & watch. Cost £35'ish. No waiting for any disks to be burned!

I've got one on order from eBay - let you know if it's any good

Just a quick mention that I've got this up & running and it works a treat. Just copy the video file onto the disk & play through the TV AV sockets. Much better than squinting at your pc/laptop monitor. Only slight limitation is that disk format has to be FAT32, which means you can only use first 32 gig to store your files (although you can partition the rest and use as external storage for your pc or use an old 40gig drive you may have hanging around). I think there's a filesize limit of about 4gig, but this isn't really a problem for Divx files.

Looks quite big in the photo, but it's not much bigger than a 3.5" drive. Overheating did not seem to be a major problem, even after formatting & watching for a couple of hours.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

you what?!

fat 32 does not have a 32 GB storage limit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

 

[Sunray]

It does have a 4gb file size limit though so with todays disk sizes its best avoided for normal disks.

The 2.5" version of that player looks a clever idea.

I am toying with getting an xbox off ebay, soft modding it, adding a ethernet to wifi and then running the XBMC software to play files directly over the network.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

4gb is really huge though

i mean it would occur if you were perhaps handling dvd images or raw video but no compressed video would get that size

 

[rhod]

Yeah, I was a bit dense there, Shippou Chan. What I meant was that XP's own utilities can't format above 32g in FAT32, although there's nothing to stop you using a third party utility or another OS to do just that. I might have a crack using a Knoppix LiveCD

 

[Divisive Cotton]

Just as a question on DVD AVI standalones...

I bought one about a year ago

However, some films that I burn do not play properly while but they are okay to watch on my PC

It may be that there's problems with my DVD player, but is it a problem with new versions of DivX or Xvid codecs?

I've checked the manual and I can't upgrade the DVD players hardware - so would new versions of these codecs affect the playing of films transcoded into AVI?

 

[rhod]

Sounds like it could well be an updated codec problem. Little blighters are coming out all the time. You might want to analyse a few files that do or don't play with something like this. If the non-playing codecs came out within the last year or so, then that will probably confirm it.

Despite what the DVD manual might say, it may well be worth googling the model number "+ firmware" or something, in case somebody has worked out a way of doing it.