Philips DVP5960 What Are They Waiting For?

[Trac]

The overwhelming discussion in the DVD Player Forum is the lack of USB 2.0 Hardware with the Philips DVP5960.
It is quite obvious, that the consumer wants a home theatre solution without having to chain their PC to the Television.

By Philips own admission:
“…the personal computing (PC) and consumer electronics (CE) worlds are engaged in an epic race that promises to transform electronic home entertainment for hundreds of millions of consumers.”

For 8 months Philips has limped along with USB 1.1, while the consumer has been working and tweaking the DVP5960 with firmware, hacks, and every conceivable USB HD/card reader to improve the feasibility of DivX / XviD through USB.

Since Philips is so slow to move forward, and give the consumer what they want, maybe it would help if the readers would petition them to build/upgrade their DVP to USB 2.0 with continued support for DivX.

The following link supplies an email for one of Philips Corporate leaders of R&D.
http://www.research.philips.com/password/archive/26/pw26_digitalhome.html

If You Write,
PLEASE KEEP THE EMAIL VERY BRIEF.

[stagescrew]

Maybe you could help those of us that aren't so high on the geek scale to understand what the upside or improvement would be. I bought one of these just before christmas, and I just slogged through 13 pages of another thread here about this, can came away with the impression that USB 1.1 was more than capable of the bit rate throughput required by VBR encoded Divx/Xvid encoded files. Another thread dealt with a firmware hack (that essentially went to an earlier version no longer available on Philips website) to improve the reported "shaky" video on noisy or fast action scenes created by the latest firmware update.

Can you give us a simple pro v con list.

[Trac]

The upside is simple; the option to encode at a higher quality.
The Con, I can’t set AutoGK @ 65% and VBR audio for ALL Videos.
F-Swed did a great job of upgrading the firmware which I’ve installed and len0x did an amazing work with AutoGK. However, these tools are limited by the USB 1.1 bandwidth.
For example “The Island” chase scene with the clones buzzing around on the Black Wasp will only play stutter free @ 35% quality using the XviD codec and VBR audio.
At 40% it is tolerable, but beyond that, the stutter is too annoying.
If the USB were 2.0 the video would play stutter free even @ 100%, leaving the quality and file size up to the individual and not the limits of the hardware.
In Geek terms;
USB 1.1 theoretically allows for a bandwidth of 12Mbps whereas 2.0 is 40 times that at 480Mbps.
In the real world, you won’t see throughput anywhere near that, but with 2.0 there would probably be no discussions about video stutter with relation to the hardware.
The average bitrate for high quality DVDs is 9.8Mbps, but they won’t play through the USB 1.1(12Mbps) port without blowing major chunks.
The bottom line, for a few extra bucks(if that), Philips could build these players with 2.0 and sell them for twice the price. What are they waiting for?

[jagabo]

The bottom line, for a few extra bucks(if that), Philips could build these players with 2.0 and sell them for twice the price. What are they waiting for?

Probably not for a few extra dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if they are using a single chip with integrated CPU, I/O interfaces, and memory. In fact they probably buy fully assembled boards from the real manufacturer. Or at most are manufacturing the boards based on the suppliers reference design with a few firmware mods.

Even if they are using separate components and could upgrade only the USB controller chip the CPU probably can't handle the higher data rates (USB is pretty CPU intensive). So a new CPU would be needed, then maybe a new chipset to support the new CPU, and new memory to along with it. Now you have a complete redesign that will cost twice as much to manufacture. I doubt they would sell many at that price. One could spend a few dollars more and get an Oppo with HD Divx playback instead.

Eventually of course, prices of the components will come down and make it feasible. But it will be a new model. Maybe by then they can also get the long filename support sorted out! (Actually I doubt they will fix that. Long filenames aren't difficult, I'm sure they could have added the support in the three years (?) since the 642 came out. I suspect it's a patent issue.)

[Trac]

Probably not for a few extra dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if they are using a single chip with integrated CPU, I/O interfaces, and memory. In fact they probably buy fully assembled boards from the real manufacturer... (USB is pretty CPU intensive).

I was afraid of that.
I had considered that it was all pretty much integrated, and a new model would be required, but I didn't know the USB was that taxing on the CPU. I assumed that data input was the same wether it be optical or USB, especially if it is self powered as apposed to a flash drive where the data needs to be pulled in.

[would_like_to_know]

Well, people petitioning here.

Is that too much trouble to burn the stupid high quality DivX to a DVD+RW disk, and then play from there? It only takes like 10 minutes with 8x, which is like 12Mb/sec burn speed, a lot faster than many USB2 drives currently on the market! I have Kingston flash, it does 6Mb, less than DVD at 8x ...