Do you think the Dreamcast has the horsepower to play DivX movies?

[SuperFreaky]

I think I've read about one in development, but can't find a link. It would be pretty sweet if it could, I've heard the MPEG player (GypPlay v1.1) is pretty good.
Do you think its possible?

 

[twobrain]

no... it barely plays vcds well... dc has bad 2d

 

[Mark]

I have the Divx player for DC. Actually what it is, is it's a program that will convert divx movies to SFS files which is aanother movie format that only the DC knows.

 

[SuperFreaky]

Even if the Dreamcast has bad 2D it can still output more than 25FPS which is all you usually need to watch a movie. The bottleneck will most likely be Dreamcast's 200Mhz CPU (it takes a 350Mhz PII to run a Divx movie in full frames on a computer). I don't know much about the dreamcast CPU, but hopefully it handles DivX decoding better than the x86 instuction set can.

It probably won't happen, but it would be cool if it did...

 

[MattStone]

I'd like to mess around w/my DC and VCDs and DivX movies...can someone tell me what I need, and where to get it. Sorry for the "i'm a dumbass" questions...but I honestly didn't know I could use the dc for such things.

 

[Linh]

hmm, i had no idea they could even play divx. another reason for me to buy a DC

 

[Wingznut]

Well, they don't really. I have a DC, and a few movies were released for it, the last one being Hollowman. Quality is damn impressive. But no... not DVD quality.

 

[IaPuP]

A DiVX decoder would be plausable.

Remember that the CPU of the DC is much more optimized toward graphics and rendering than a 'normal' CPU. it also includes some Vector ops and a bit of SIMD if I remebmer correctly.

I think with a vectorized algorithm, perhaps the FFT algo, the DC could decode ALMOST fast enough.

Eric

 

[SuperFreaky]

anybody seen a link to the DivX player in development? I know I read about it somewhere...

 

[vohwink1]

Check out DC Emulation

They have the Gyplay software, and some other useful tools to get stuff running on your dreamcast. Now, I have used a conversion program specified there to convert a DivX movie to the special format for dreamcast, and I can tell you.. pretty damn slick. But, I did notice some frames being dropped in really fast action scenes, but I think eventually when better code is written for these programs we can see some performance gains.

Also, I talked to someone there and I guess they are talking to someone who made a PC DivX decoder, and they are begging him to port is to Windows CE so it can work in the dreamcast. But I don't know the details, just search around that website for more useful information.

 

[SuperFreaky]

sweet link, thanks!

 

[illbot]

2brain is wrong and stupid, dc can handle close to dvd quality
it may work

 

[Marsupial]

The SH4 that is in the Dreamcast is a very efficient cpu IMO.
In particular, it has a very good FPU. From the figures I've seen, at 200 MHz, it's probably about half as powerful (for floating point ops) as a decent (~800 Mhz) Pc processor. Given properly optimized software, the Dreamcast shouldn't have a problem.