Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You: The Next Generation of DVD Players

(ARA) - Hard to believe but the all important holiday shopping season is just around the corner. That begs a rather serious question for technophiles, early adopters and market watchers everywhere: What is this year's must-have consumer electronic gift, and where can I buy three?

For the millions of computer users who've turned to their PCs and the Internet as a new way to buy, share and manage video content, the answer is simple, if a little redundant: DVD players.

Sure, everyone on your shopping list probably already owns a DVD player. But that fact alone doesn't put you out of the mall just yet. A new generation of DVD players capable of playing advanced compression formats popularized on the Internet are making the rounds, and making older generation DVD players look a little gray around the temples. The latest devices offer new capabilities that old DVD players can't handle. While these products will still play standard DVDs, the real draw of the new breed of devices is support for a new compression format made popular on personal computers, the widely used DivX video technology.

New DivX-powered DVD players from companies such as Philips Electronics are available now at retail stores everywhere, from CompUSA to your neighborhood Target store, and by the holiday season they will be near ubiquitous. These devices bridge the gap from PC to TV and home office to living room; by playing everything from MP3s to digital video CDs, DivX-powered DVD players will finally unite the various media formats and platforms in the home.

This leap forward is achieved thanks to support for advanced video compression technologies, called codecs (compression/decompression algorithms). Codecs are complex chunks of computer code that intelligently squeeze digital video down to sizes small enough to be transferred over the Internet, stored on computer hard drives or burned to CDs -- think "MP3 for video." The DivX video codec, the most popular of the new generation of video technologies, can shrink down a standard DVD roughly 10 times, (VHS over 100 times) while maintaining the original video quality. This simple fact enables huge changes in the way people can interact with the video in their lives. Hundreds of millions of high-quality DivX files exist on the Internet today, but until recently those videos have only been playable on PCs. With DVD players like the Philips device, that's all beginning to change.

Aaron Hawkins, a 31-year-old technology enthusiast from San Diego, Calif., is just one of the consumers chomping at the bit to get his hands on a next-generation DVD player. "I have tons of DivX videos and other media files on my hard-drive, and they look great on my PC but what I really want is a product that will bring those movies to my living room," Hawkins says. "A DVD player that can flawlessly playback all my DivX files is a dream come true, and I can imagine that every player sold will have that capability pretty soon; the same way that you can't buy a CD player today that doesn't support MP3 playback."

As Hawkins points out, the electronics industry has experienced this kind of transition before. Shortly after the audio compression format called MP3 gained popularity as the digital standard for music files a few years ago, consumer electronics makers responded by offering CD players that could handle not only standard CDs, but also data CDs containing MP3 audio. Suddenly music from the home computer could be enjoyed on a personal stereo, in a car or even on a jog with devices like iPods and MP3 compatible personal disc players.

Now imagine camcorders, DVD players and handheld video players that can all record and play the same video format. A format small enough to send over the Internet, save on hard drives or burn to CDs. Whether you're the kind of person who feels compelled to buy the next big thing simply because it is the next big thing or you still keep one wall of your living room bare for projecting 8 mm film reels, chances are pretty good that advanced video codecs will be finding their way into your media collection fairly soon; you may as well be ready. The Jones' certainly will be.

Courtesy of ARA Content