DV / MJPEG playback with hardware players

[huykin]

Do any hardware DVD / blueray / multimedia players play DV and/or MJPEG? With recent popularity of USB2 and network connections, and ease of DV and MJPEG decoding, I am surprised players are not adding this. Would be nice to plug a USB hard drive with a library of videos from camcorder (DV) and camera (MJPEG), and get them played without having to encode to MPEG2/DivX/AVC or connect a computer to TV. There must be high end $$$ hardware that can play DV, but I am thinking about cheap consumer players like Philips DVD/DivX players and WD HD player.

Thanks

[guns1inger]

DV and Mjpeg are considered "old tech" and not played by much any more. Apple ditched firewire as a standard port on the last model of Mac Book Pro's. Even when DV was in, it wasn't really catered for outside of the PC. Yes, you can by DV playback decks, and some DVD recorders had DV in/out ports from direct recording, but this was converted to mpeg-2 on the way in, not stored as DV.

Like it or not, AVCHD is the way of the consumer future. If you want to use more practical formats, you have to pay or stay in the PC realm.

[jman98]

I don't know of any such players and the WD HD player doesn't support those either.

[edDV]

DV and Mjpeg are considered "old tech" and not played by much any more. Apple ditched firewire as a standard port on the last model of Mac Book Pro's. Even when DV was in, it wasn't really catered for outside of the PC. Yes, you can by DV playback decks, and some DVD recorders had DV in/out ports from direct recording, but this was converted to mpeg-2 on the way in, not stored as DV.

Like it or not, AVCHD is the way of the consumer future. If you want to use more practical formats, you have to pay or stay in the PC realm.

I wouldn't dismiss DV that quickly. Apple in particular still defaults all programs (iMovie/FCE/FCP) to DV/HDV as do most PC edit programs.

The issue for playback is 25Mb/s bit rate for DV and greater for quality MJPEG. These are considered intermediate editing formats not distribution formats. I routinely play out DV video to my various TV sets via a Canopus ADVC from edit programs, MCE, VLC or WinDV.

As HD video becomes popular at the consumer end, high bit rate playback is becoming a necessity. The current cener of attention is the Blu-Ray player which uses MPeg2, h.264 or VC-1 codecs. As a subset of h.264 they allow non-DRM playback of AVCHD to accommodate consumer camcorders.

Media players like the Western Digital or MCE Extenders use generic decoder chipsets that do not support DV or MJPEG formats mainly because of low user demand and added royalty costs.

[guns1inger]

I wouldn't dismiss DV that quickly. Apple in particular still defaults all programs (iMovie/FCE/FCP) to DV/HDV as do most PC edit programs.

Not necessarily my view, but just how the consumer product ranges are going. It is harder and harder to by new DV or HDV camears at the consumer level. Everything is either AVCHD on memory card, or worse, SD crushed by some vague variant of H264 that nothing reads correctly. Either that, or it is HDD based cameras that record using mpeg-2 in the MOD file format.

DV is still the best edit format, although the colour cost of the compression at the consumer level (and the generally poor quality of optics at the consumer level) are still the big disappointment of the format.

However none of this has anything to do with playback support. If all the camera manufacturers have pulled away from the format at the consumer level, why would anyone provide playback support for it. They consider it dead as far as new business is concerned. Rightly or wrongly.

[edDV]

I wouldn't dismiss DV that quickly. Apple in particular still defaults all programs (iMovie/FCE/FCP) to DV/HDV as do most PC edit programs.

Not necessarily my view, but just how the consumer product ranges are going. It is harder and harder to by new DV or HDV camears at the consumer level. Everything is either AVCHD on memory card, or worse, SD crushed by some vague variant of H264 that nothing reads correctly. Either that, or it is HDD based cameras that record using mpeg-2 in the MOD file format.

DV is still the best edit format, although the colour cost of the compression at the consumer level (and the generally poor quality of optics at the consumer level) are still the big disappointment of the format.

However none of this has anything to do with playback support. If all the camera manufacturers have pulled away from the format at the consumer level, why would anyone provide playback support for it. They consider it dead as far as new business is concerned. Rightly or wrongly.

I don't disagree with your assessment of the direction of consumer camcorders, but the DV format is still alive and well in prosumer and pro circles to the extent SD video is still being used. PC editors mostly handle native DV, MPeg-2 and HDV these days but Apple still converts all SD formats to DV for editing. Apple converts all HD formats to a digital intermedite. I'm ignoring uncompressed SD pro editing for this discussion.

We also need to separate consumer MiniDV tape format from the DV video format (DVCAM, DVCPro and digitally stored DV).

So my point is, DV format and DV editing will remain so long as SD video is used. This is similar to saying DVD is not going to die anytime soon. IMO Blu-Ray has not succeeded in replacing DVD. AVCHD is a proprietary placeholder format for consumer HD camcorders. The consumer HD format wars are still wide open.

Pro HD video is converging on XDCAM MPeg2 based formats (including HDV) and intraframe AVC or wavelet solutions (e.g. AVC-Intra and various digital intermediates).