Posted on: Sunday, June 22, 2003

D1's no treasure for film pirates

Bravo D1 by V Inc. is the first player sold in the United States intended for DivX movies. It works well with legal DivX 5 movie clips downloaded from DivX.com, which sells the encoding software. V Inc. via Associated Press

By Peter Svensson
Associated Press

NEW YORK — It's sure to draw the attention of movie pirates, and I don't mean the kind played by Errol Flynn: a DVD player that also supports the most popular format for movies swapped on the Web.

The appeal of downloaded movies has been limited by the fact that nobody really wants to watch them on a computer. The living room TV is the preferred viewing option, but it's been largely out of bounds, since movies in the DivX format will play on computers only.

Enter V Inc.'s Bravo D1, the first player sold in the United States that claims to play DivX movies.

Tinseltown need not fear, though.

The $199 D1 isn't much of a threat. Before I explain why, a short primer:

Pirates use DivX because movies grabbed straight from DVDs — after their copy protection has been thwarted — are too big to download. DivX software compresses the file while maintaining much of the image quality.

The problem is that there are several versions of DivX. For each, different compression settings can be used.

V Inc., a small Fountain Valley, Calif. company that otherwise makes flat-panel TVs, claims that the D1 plays only the latest two versions, DivX 4 and 5, and only if certain settings are used during the video recording process.

So if you're a digital director who likes to edit your own movies and produce them in either of those two DivX formats, the D1 might be for you.

Fans of pirated movies, on the other hand, will be disappointed because the vast majority of such films circulate online in the earlier DivX 3 format. I did find four movies, however, in DivX 4 and 5 on Kazaa, the prime venue for illegal swapping of copyrighted files.

I used a computer's CD burner to transfer those movies to CDs and popped them into the D1. Result: Three froze after a couple of minutes, and one wouldn't play at all.

Legal DivX 5 movie clips downloaded from DivX.com, which sells the encoding software, played fine and looked excellent.

Sigma Designs Inc., which makes the player's decoding chip, said files on Kazaa are inconsistently compressed. Their own testing has produced mixed results in playing them back.

The D1 did play movies encoded in the much lower-quality MPEG-1 format, but so do a lot of other DVD players. It also plays standard DVDs, which are encoded in MPEG-2 and copy-protected.

For those looking for a way to show pirated movies, the D1 isn't it. But it's sure to have successors, and a clear winner may emerge, making movie piracy almost as widespread as music piracy.