Philips 642- Some DivX / XVID files look garbled

[MedievalMan]

I have tried many movies in various formats on this player, almost all work great!

I accepted the fact that it might not play all XVID or DIVX files, but here's my question:

I've tested about 20-30 XVID and DIVX files on DVD or CD. Almost all of them play flawlessly , except for a few.

I played the files in VLC media player to get the audio/video properties, and compared to ones that do play correctly, there doesn't seem to be much difference. IE.

XVID, 576 x 304 , audio mpga 48000 HZ ---> works flawlessly

XVID, 400x304, audio mpga 48000 HZ , looks garbled with wierd color artificats.

XVID, 608x256, mpga, 48000 hz, same as above. garbled wierd color artificats.

I understand there is a maximum resolution it supports, but other files higher resolution than the last one listed here work fine.

Any ideas on what might cause this?

[MedievalMan]

I found a bizzare fix:

for both the files that didn't play correctly that I mentioned, entering and exiting the setup menu fixes it..

It's great that it fixes the problem, but not sure why!

30 of 30 DivX/Xvid files work then!

[absinthecarolinas]

Yes, this is a well-known phenomenon with this player. I believe the cause of the weird playback, or at least one of the causes, is use of custom MPEG quantization matrices for encoding.

-abs

[dog-god]

just bought the philips 630 today and fired 6 movies on to a dvd - very happy with it on 4 of them but i got 2 that were garbled
so i went back to comp to check if any differences
there are all 3 framerates and all audios in these movie files but the only thing i noticed is in gspot is that the movies that played properly had in the user data box that it was put together with
[JUNK] Nandub build 1852
and the container said
Interleave: 1 vid frame (40 ms), preload=480

while the 2 that didnt play had in user data
[JUNK] VirtualDubMod build 2178
and the container said
Interleave: 1 vid frame (42 ms), preload=504

now im not sure if this is a possible cause or not

i wonder can i split the bad movie into vid and audio with nandub and put it backtogether so i can test

late now so ill look into tomorrow

[manono]

Hi-

You won't have to separate out the audio and video to accomplish what you want. Just Direct Stream Copy both the audio and video using Nandub, and it'll use the Nandub default audio settings on the audio. Then save it under a different name, open it in GSpot, and you should be able to see the change. However, I'm not sure if that's the cause of your problem. As stated above, it may have been caused by the use of Custom Quant Matrices. You might try the trick mentioned above to see if it works for you.

On the other hand, you may be onto something.

[dog-god]

the trick dosent work for me - neither did the quick work with nandub

however got a new piece of info on how to recogonise a bad avi for this player
i grabbed avi info
http://files.divx-digest.com/nicky/avinfo_1.2a.zip
and it wont open these 2 particular avis
Wimbledon.DVDRip.XviD-DVL
National.Lampoons.Christmas.Vacation.2.DVDRip.XviD-SAPHiR

error is
there was a prob opening the file(FillStruc)

so i guess at leats i can find out bad ones before i burn them

as for Wimbledon i recooded it using drdivx using a custom profile and works perfect now

[dog-god]

found another that avi info wouldnt open but this plays perfectly on the 630

so i guess its back to searching for a way to find good files from bad for this player

the funny thing is my mate picked up a goodmans player that plays divx and it plays Wimbledon perfectly

[cubix]

Hi
Similar problems with the dvp-630 with most xvid's I try to play and usually end up re-encoding them with Dr-divx. Is there anything Philips can do about this in one of their firmware updates and if so how do we let them know?

[MessiaH289]

The reason they look garbled is because this player is designed around 24-bit video sample rate. If you play an MPEG4 at 12-bit video sample rate, it comes out garbled and full of artifacts, using the System Menu button fixes this.