Play MPEG4 video on your TV

Play MPEG4 video on your TV

Inexpensive DVD players that play everything—even your backed up, compressed DVDs

Nikhil Hemrajani TNN
(Times of India,Mumbai. Page 23, Date 26 July 2007)

While Blu-ray and HD-DVD players are already making the rounds, these are still too expensive for the average buyer to pick up. If you’ve paid a visit to your neighbourhood consumer electronics store recently, you would have no doubt confirmed the prices for yourself. So, there’s still a large market for users who want to upgrade to a home theatre setup and who don’t want to spend Rs 50,000 and upwards on a high definition player. Here’s where DivX/Xvid players step in. In a nutshell, DivX and Xvid are video codecs that conform to the MPEG4 standard. What these codecs boast of is a large reduction in file size with a minimal loss in quality. For example, try backing up a DVD movie on your computer. Depending on whether the DVD is single-layer or dual-layer, the amount of space you require will range from 4 GB to 8 GB! And if you don’t have a mammoth hard drive, then ten such back-ups would mean that all the space on your hard drive is used up. Here’s where the MPEG4 standard shines. With programs such as Gordian Knot and Nero Vision, you can save those DVD videos on your computer while using one-fifth of the space required, with a virtually unnoticeable loss in quality (depending on how large a screen you’ll watch the video on). But in order to watch those videos on your television, you’ll need a DVD player that’s also capable of playing those MPEG4 videos.