First standalone DVD-Player to support DivX-Pro decompression

November 28, 2003

The German IT-news service Golem reports about a new standalone DVD-Player from Elta that is capable of playing Videos which are compressed with DivX Pro. Unlike most other MP4-Players, this drive also supports the MPEG4 Advanced Profile.

According to Elta the 8883 MP4 supports advanced compression methods of the MPEG-4 Advanced Profile, which are partly used by DivX Pro and newer versions of Xvid:

Global Motion Compensation (GMC)
Motion compensation for quarterpixels (QPel)
B-Frame support
Post-processing
Data Partition (DP)
Error Resync Marker (RM)

Due to the fact that the chips from Sigma and ESS do not support all these features, Elta is using a different, but currently unknown chip for their drives.

It supports media of type CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW and among support for playback of DivX and Xvid, it is capable of playing the usual formats like Audio-CD, MP3, OGG, DVD, VCD, SVCD and even DVD-Audio. The only thing missing is SACD.

The drive will probably be sold for about 120 Euro from middle of December. I think the price is not too high if the drive can keep up with what it promises. In one of their forum threads, the author of this article rumours, that the drive is even capable of WMA-Playback. Not many formats left this drive cannot play back then.

Source: Golem.de