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Free DivX player available for E-series phones

8 replies · 136,355 views · Started 25 September 2006

elp 25 Sep 2006, 13:39

Hi,

Techmundo (http://techmundo.org/?p=46) has unearthed a new video player for S60 3rd edition supposedly able to play DivX files directly. It's offered for free by DivX and is available for all Windows, Palm and Symbian smartphones.

Navigate to http://mobile.divx.com on your phone, register and you'll be able to download 2 applications:
- DivX Mobile Player: a DivX player that looks a lot like SmartMovies
- Discover DivX Mobile: a Java-based RSS news reader

EDIT: both the player and the RSS reader can be downloaded without registration here: http://mobile.divx.com/DivXMobileDownload.xhtml

I haven't yet found out what the RSS reader is supposed to be used for. According to the description on the web site, it should allow you to browse and download DivX movies but, from what i've seen, it's just a basic RSS news reader and i haven't yet found a way to download and play movie files attached to the posts.

There are some music videos and movie trailer available to download from the mobile web site though so you can use them to try out the player.

First impressions of the player were very bad: you have to endure a silly 5 seconds animation whenever you launch it and i haven't yet found a way to skip or disable it. I hate this kind of nonsense crap.

Fortunately, the player itself looks pretty good. As i said, it looks a lot like smartmovie. I actually wouldn't be surprised if they had simply licensed it. It supports both windowed and full screen video playback. On the E61, you'll have to tweak the settings to get the full screen mode to work properly (in order to get the video to play in landscape mode, you have to choose... "Portait" in the settings).

The few music videos and trailers i've tried worked OK. Playback is smooth but the picture quality is awful, which is very disapointing given that modern smartphones are able to play video with near-DVD video quality. I haven't yet tried with any other file than those offered on the DivX mobile web site though.

Overall, it looks promizing. If they sort out their RSS reader to make it easy to find and download videos (and if the videos are of better quality than those offered so far on their web site), it might become a cool application. There are a few quirks:
- just like real player, the player pauses when you send it to the background. This might be a desirable behaviour in some cases but I'd like to be able to choose in the settings whether or not the player should automatically pause when sent to the background
- as with most crossplatform applications, the application uses non-standard and pretty bad looking UI controls. Not such a big deal for a video player i suppose tough.
- When you ask the app to rescan the file system, the entire application freezes for the whole duration of the scan, there is no "please wait" message or progress bar displayed. Very frustrating.

desertrat 25 Sep 2006, 14:39

elp wrote:Navigate to http://mobile.divx.com on your phone, register and you'll be able to download 2 applications:
- DivX Mobile Player: a DivX player that looks a lot like SmartMovies
- Discover DivX Mobile: a Java-based RSS news reader

For the player at least, you don't have to register to be able to download it. I was quite shocked by the amount of personal information that it asked for so I didn't register, but clicking around a bit there is a link which goes straight to the downloads page. I didn't notice the RSS reader though - but judging by your comments it's nothing to worry about.

I'm pretty happy with the player, the only complaint I have is that the volume (I've only tried all those trailers so far) is pretty low (and I'm still using the non-latest E70 firmware). However I'm still looking forward to something like The Core Media Player.

elp 25 Sep 2006, 14:46

desertrat wrote:For the player at least, you don't have to register to be able to download it. I was quite shocked by the amount of personal information that it asked for so I didn't register

Yes, they're asking for the full name, post code, phone number, phone model and mobile network operator you're using! I don't quite know why they're asking all that plus it makes it a chore to register with mobiles that only have a numeric keypad. You obviously do not have to give them all that, i used a fake name, post code and phone number and it worked just fine.

elp 25 Sep 2006, 16:31

So I've tried with a few small DivX files i've found, including the test DivX file provided on the DivX web site (the normal one not the mobile one) to test if the DivX codecs have been installed properly and none of them worked. The player compains about DIV3 codec not found. So it seems that this player is only able to play DivX files encoded specifically for mobiles which renders it a lot less useful than i imagined :icon13:

ojobson 25 Jan 2007, 22:44

Does anyone know if their is a way to alter volume whilst playing videos using Divx Player? I have an N73, and whilst the image quality is good, the volume is too loud whithout earphones and too quiet with them and unadjustable in both occurances.

Does anyone know a work around for this?

Thanks.

Earl1983 21 Nov 2007, 09:00

ojobson wrote:Does anyone know if their is a way to alter volume whilst playing videos using Divx Player? I have an N73, and whilst the image quality is good, the volume is too loud whithout earphones and too quiet with them and unadjustable in both occurances.

Does anyone know a work around for this?

Thanks.

Hi)
I have DivXPlayer special for SymbianOS)))