Apex AD-1500 plays MPEG video files

[JHebert]

I read at the nerd-out DVD forums that the Apex AD-1500 DVD player can play raw MPEG1 and MPEG2 video files directly from a regular data CD-R without the need to author them to VCD or SVCD, similar to how it plays MP3 audio files. I believe the MPEG files just have to be compliant VCD/SVCD streams. Can any AD-1500 owners confirm or deny this? Does it work on other Apex players or just this model?

Also, here is an idea that occurred to me. I know that Apex and some other brands use standard IDE DVD-ROM drives in their DVD players. I wonder if it would be possible to replace the DVD-ROM drive with an IDE hard drive full of either raw MPEG files, or VCD/SVCD/DVD program folders? Could the DVD player hardware recognize a hard drive? What file system would you use to format the hard drive? I doubt that FAT would work, but maybe formatting a hard drive in the UDF file system could trick the player into reading the drive, since UDF is part of the DVD Video specification and would have to be supported by the player. It would be cool to have this set up like a video jukebox with 100GB of SVCDs selectable through the player's menu system.

[JHebert]

It seems I am not the only one to think of installing a hard drive in a DVD player. Sampo recently came out with a new player model DV631CF that has a cool extra feature - A CompactFlash card reader so you can plug in a memory card with photos, MP3s, etc to play on the DVD player. Some hackers figured out how to attach an IDE hard drive as a slave drive and control it via the firmware interface for the CF reader. They also flashed the firmware from the DV631CF onto the older DV620 player to enable this functinonality in that player. Here is the link:
http://www.area450.com/thesampozone/articles/harddrive.htm

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JHebert on 2001-10-23 23:57:39 ]</font>

[El_Mero_Zooter]

it did play an mpg1 file for me.
dont think it played the audio though. cant recall off hand.

ztr

[ilc]

[quote]
On 2001-10-23 22:52:43, JHebert wrote:
I read at the nerd-out DVD forums that the Apex AD-1500 DVD player can play raw MPEG1 and MPEG2 video files directly from a regular data CD-R without the need to author them to VCD or SVCD, similar to how it plays MP3 audio files. I believe the MPEG files just have to be compliant VCD/SVCD streams. Can any AD-1500 owners confirm or deny this? Does it work on other Apex players or just this model?

Here are the Apex players that will play raw MPEG files:

Apex 660
Apex 700
Apex 1500
Apex 5131

Some others that will also do it:

Daewoo 3000N
Daewoo 5000N (not confirmed but very likely)
Haier 700
Sampo 631CF