New DivX-DVD-Player offered with Mediatek Chipset

December 22, 2003

The german publisher Heise.de reports in their online
newsticker that the German discounter Aldi Nord offers a new 3rd generation DVD player with DivX
support that includes quarter pixels (QPEL) and Global Motion Compensation
(GMC). Like the Elta
8883, this player also uses the Mediatek MT1389 chipset.

The chip
used in this player ought to play back DivX 3.11, DivX 4.x and 5.x with
QPel (motion estimation up to quarter pixels) and GMC (global motion
compensation) with bitrates up to 8 MBit/s (DivX 5.x up to 10 MBit/s) but
the chip is only understands 1-Warp-Point GMC, so on can expect problems
during playback of XviD with GMC and Nero Ditial MPEG-4.

DivX files were played back without complaints, only
during fast forwarding or backwards the player had some small
timeouts. Also older XviD files caused some problems. They were
played back much too slow and sometime caused the playback to stop for a
few seconds.

Further problems came up during playback of MP3 and
WMA. The device was not able to play WM9 files with 320 kBit/s, while ID3
tags are currently unknown to the player at
all.

The drive offers an integrated Dolby Digital (AC3 5.1) decoder and offers
support for progressive scan if supported by the displaying device.

Unfortunately the original offer is unavailable from the Aldi
website now. Interesting is the very low price of only 80 Euro, compared to more
than 100 Euro for the Elta player. You are welcome to discuss this device in
our General Hardware Forum.

Source: Heise.de