Buy a writer or wait for Divx player?

[Timster]

Lots of news lately of upcoming players that will support Divx. I've been making MPEG 2s into VCDs with the VCD header trick and have been very happy with the quality. Only down side has been the time it takes to encode and having to use 2 Cds. My questions are: with new players soon to be on the market that will play Divx, will I be able to put an average movie on one CD? and how long does it take to encode Divx movies like this. Secondly which would be smarter, Spending $165 for a DVD writer now or wait for a cheapo brand player($40-50, apex etc.) that supports Divx? No HDTV here. Just looking for a few opinions.

[garryheather]

My personal feeling is DivX enabled DVD players will only reach a minority audience - along with the users of XVid - as far as home use goes. It might be nice to have a player that does both if you have a lot of material in DivX, but if you're looking for widespread compatibility I would stick with DVD given the choice. Plus, you might find these players die a natural death, in which case you could have a load of discs to keep your Video2000 and Betamax tapes company if the player ever goes wrong and you can't source a replacement (assuming you don't retain them for PC use, of course).

On the whole, codec's like DivX seem to a used by two niche groups of people. Games developers, and er... people for whom download times could be an issue, if you get my drift. Yes, you can get a feature length movie on one disc and the results can be stunning (I have seen output from DivX5 Pro and they were most impressive), BUT I have seen reference in the forums to incompatibilities with different versions of the codecs. They seem to be very much a minority audience.

On a PC, this isn't too much of an issue - you can change the versions fairly easily, however the chipset versions embedded into the hardware elements commonly used today are practically a "fixed revision". I am not aware of a player that can be easily changed. Therefore, you might be limited to one specific codec version for the life of the product, and / or functionality constraints (such as bi-directional encoding, which may not be fully supported or codec dependent). No doubt you can find more information along these lines at http://www.divx.com, https://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers.php?DVDname=lvd2001&Search=Search, and http://www.liteon.com/prod/getNewProduct.do?xml_id=4_1

UK readers can buy this player from SVP.

[FT Shark]

I personally have strayed from divx. There is any extreme loss of video quality and audio quality. I would suggest getting a DVD burner so you can keep high quality video and maintain 5.1 or DTS sound. Why settle for anything else.