What can a DVD Player with Mpeg-4 play?

[Nicodemus]

Hi

Could someone please help clarify if DVD players with mpeg-4 only support DivX and XVid? That is, if it says "mpeg-4" as it does on some of the Lite-on DVD players, can I play an itunes movie? Or a Microsoft encoded mpeg-4 file? Or do I NEED to download the DivX converter, which would be a pretty big hassle.

Please, any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[David K]

First of all, there is no standard in these area, so players will vary.
That said, based on my player, the Oppo, and what I have read of others, here's my sense.
Certainly DivX and Xvid will be supported in all their versions in an AVI container. That means a file that has the extension .avi. Quicktime has its own container, and even though Quicktime uses versions of mpeg 4 codecs, DVD players typically will not play files with the .mov extension. A player might play a Microsoft mpeg 4 codec but probably only as an .avi not as a .wmv. The earlier versions of DivX (I believe version 3 and below) were indeed hacked-versions of Microsoft's mpeg 4 codec.

[Nicodemus]

Thanks for the reply David.

Just to be sure I understand before I go out and grab a player. So, if I download a mpeg-4 itunes file and converted it to an "avi container", I could play it and it wouldn't need to use DivX or Xvid converter?

Thanks again.

[David K]

I don't know any software that will just swap containers.
You have to reencode from one format to another.
SUPER is a freeware that will convert .mov to an Xvid or DivX avi file.
But such format converting is often fraught with problems, and can take much trial and error to get the best method.
I can't give you any more specific advice because I haven't converted itunes video (as I do not own a video Ipod.) Do a forum search here. I'm sure this topic has come up.
(Doesn't the Ipod have some sort of video out so that you can play it on a T.V.?)

[Ai Haibara]

Of course, anything downloaded from the iTunes Music Store (audio or video, anyway, since I don't know about the new iPod games you can buy there ) has DRM, which means you can't simply convert them to another format as you would normal videos.

If you're also asking whether or not any players will play files with .mp4 extensions, that depends on the player. My Philips DVP-642 apparently can, but ONLY if the video is encoded with DivX/Xvid video and MP3 audio... which defeats the purpose, really.