That’d be like if going from a Pentium II to a Pentium 3 only managed 2 FPS better at MPEG2 – when what it got me was a leap from single digit FPS to faster than realtime.Ĭogeneration And District Heating For Comfortable Homes And Happy Factories 23 Comments Used to have a FX-6100, I ran a ton of benchmarks on both CPUs and the 6300 is a big boost over the 6100 in every category *except* x265 encoding where it managed at best 2 FPS faster.
Now that Handbrake, and thus VidCoder, support NVENC (about damn time!) I can batch encode video to x265 at hundreds of frames per second rather than the paltry 17~18 an AMD FX-6300 CPU can manage with 1080p video. I recently bought a nVidia GTX 1050 videocard to use its NVENC x265 compression. It’s been able to play everything I’ve plugged into its USB ports – though I haven’t tried anything really old like Cinepak or Indeo and other codecs dating back to the Windows 3.x era.
So I bought a 40″ 4K Samsung Smart TV in 2016. It’s only played 3 or 4 Blu-Ray disks and likely less than 30 DVDs in all the time I’ve had it.īut then came the siren song of HEVC x265, which the olde Blu-Ray box can’t play. Then I bought a Blu-Ray player with DIVX support, and a USB port. I’d been compressing videos to XVID for quite a while, and would burn them to DVD-R to watch on a DVD player with DIVX support.
Any standalone player, other device, or computer software that can play DIVX should be able to play XVID. But since it was also open source, the totally everything about it is free XVID clone was done. IIRC it was originally a reverse engineered hack of another codec but then developed into its own thing and also has the ability to incorporate DRM. Posted in classic hacks, home entertainment hacks, Raspberry Pi Tagged DivX, DVD player, ide, Kodi, optical drive Post navigationĭIVX is the first big improvement over MPEG2. If you’ve got the space in your entertainment for one of these early 2000’s leviathans, they might make an ideal base for your own Pi set top box build. We’ve also seen how integrating the original physical controls can really help sell the experience with these Pi-infused players. While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a DVD player get an internal Raspberry Pi, the fact that this one is using an IDE drive is an interesting spin and should make for a very clean final product.
He wants to try and get the optical drive working through a USB-to-IDE adapter so the device can come full circle and once again play burned discs full of video files, and mentions he would like to reverse engineer the front panel and IR receiver to control Kodi. This was enough to get a nice Kodi set top box that’s capable of pulling media from the Internet or the internal HDD, but has more plans for the future.
The original PSU couldn’t handle the Pi, but it does work nicely to spin up an IDE hard drive that he mounted to the top of the optical drive with zip ties. So into the cavernous enclosure went a powered USB hub, which he wired up to the original power switch on the player’s front panel.
hoped that he could tap into the player’s original power supply, but upon testing found that it wasn’t quite up to the task to reliably running a modern Pi. It even uses what appears to be a standard IDE optical drive rather than something purpose built. It’s almost as though they got a deal on some old VCR chassis laying around in a warehouse someplace and decided to stick some (at the time) modern electronics in it. He got the impression the device was a rush job, pushed out to capitalize on a relatively short-lived trend.
Upon opening the vintage set top box, was immediately struck by how empty the thing was. One might say there’s something almost perverse about taking the carcass of one of these devices and stuffing it full of the same technology that made it obsolete in the first place, but who are we to judge? Not only was he curious about what made it tick, but he thought it would be interesting to try converting it into a Raspberry Pi powered streaming media player. got his hands on one of these early digital media players, a KiSS DP-500 circa 2003, and decided that it was too unique to send off to the recycling center. Before we started streaming everything online, that was kind of a big deal. Depending on how much video compression you could stomach, a player like this would allow you to pack an entire season of a show or multiple movies onto a single disc. Though they had the outward appearance of a normal DVD player, these gadgets could read various digital video file formats off of a CD-R or DVD-R, complete with rudimentary file browser. It might seem almost comical to our more fresh-faced readers, but there was a time when you could go into a big box retailer and purchase what was known as a “DivX Player”.