Not Sure if this is where this goes but

[Jesterrace]

Is there such a thing as a hacked firmware for the Panasonic S-35 DVD Player. I want to be able to play Divx, ect. on it. And if so what is the process for doing this? Is it possible or is Jester just being a "noob" again? :insane:

[celtic_druid]

Well it would need to have a chipset (Sigma Designs, ESS or Mediatek) capable of MPEG4 decoding, otherwise no amount of firmware is going to help as most of the work is done by hardware and then a small amount done by the embeded linux, such as the stolen mplayer subtitle code on Kiss players.

Doubt any company would use such a chipset and not enable the MPEG4, etc. decoding.

[Jesterrace]

I see and at this point you don't recommend a DVD Player that supports this? RJ Tech has a nice one for a reasonable price at the moment. ;)

[celtic_druid]

Well the new Sigma chipset is supposed to support Nero Digital, which would I guess mean mp4 container, complete with chapters and subs plus lc/he aac audio in the form of stereo and multichannel. Also three warp point GMC, qpel and bframe decoding.

Then again I really can't recommend Sigma designs. I guess I just haven't forgiven them for the whole stolen XviD source code thing.

Current situation though you have all kinds of problems, like the ESS chipset can't handle encodes that use custom quant matricies. Don't think any of the chipsets can yet handle 3 warp point GMC. Then you have all the issues with using MPEG4 video in an AVI, like some prefer packed bitstream on for more than one bframe, others prefer it off. So I guess to be safe you have to restrict yourself to only one bframe, as DivX does.

[Jesterrace]

In otherwords, keep it to my PC or mod my XBOX. ;)

[celtic_druid]

Well if you already have an XBox, then that sounds like a decent cheap solution to me.

[nimbles]

xbmc (on the xbox) doesn't have the menu support (yet- i guess it will when mplayer gets it) as far as i know only that nero showtime prog does support menus in mp4 containers created with nero recode?

i'm surrised none of the big manufacturer's haven't jumped on the divx/xvid ship but i guess the whole avi thing is a grey area i mean you can't buy avi's legally over the counter?

currently with the streaming media support an xbox with xbmc installed does supercede even the kiss players with network support (not that they're the best chipset wise by any means), there are some python developers who are currently hacking the kiss web interface to add that functionality (kiss radio front end- linked to shoutcast amongst other things) to xbmc as well.

tomshardware suggested xbox/xbmc is the best solution (short of a mediacenter pc)

would like something sleeker myself

[celtic_druid]

Didn't think that Nero Digital was doing mp4 menus yet. Playback and creation of menus and even more interactive content (games, etc.) is however possible. No playback via dshow though.