Digital Home Thoughts: The DVX-POD: Great Idea, Poor Execution

Video Playback – A Dismal Story
Playing back videos that you’ve put on the DVX-POD is simple enough – you can play, pause, stop and fast forward or go back at 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x speeds. Pressing the next/previous buttons briefly takes you back to the file picker, then it starts up the next or previous video. It would be much cleaner if it just started the video. You can’t build playlists of multiple videos – you can watch the videos one at a time, and you can’t loop the video clip either.


Figure 7: The DVX-POD hooked up to a 51" TV - video playback, as recorded by the PVR component, is decent but not spectacular - mostly due to the low quality of the video source recorded. Click the image for a bigger version.


Figure 8: With higher quality video, the playback is remarkably better - this clip from Ice Age looked excellent! Click the image for a bigger version.

The biggest problem with video playback is that it wouldn’t play back most of the videos I transferred over to it. Although the documentation claims to be compatible with WMV, MPEG2, AVI, and DivX, I had a very difficult time playing my content on the DVX-POD, which is a death blow for a device like this.

So what did I try to play? I first tried some beefy MPEG2 files that were recorded from SnapStream’s Beyond TV3 – they wouldn’t even show up in the file selector! Next I tried playing the WMV files that Snapstream created – it feeds these files through the Windows Media Encoder, so these are 100% compliant WMV files. They wouldn’t play at all. When I pressed the select button, the screen would go black for a second, and then it would come back to the file picker. No errors message, no indication that anything was wrong.

Now here’s where it gets confusing – the DVX-POD came pre-loaded with all sorts of video files (MPEG, AVI, DiVX, WMV), in a variety of different resolutions and bit rates, and they all played back perfectly. So what made these sample files different from my own content? I wasn’t sure, so I decided to throw a variety of different content at it – some that I had on my hard drive, some that I randomly downloaded from a P2P network. I wanted to get a variety of different files prepared using a variety of different codecs. The results were ugly.

Random ASF files: 0 of 2 played (no video, no audio)
Random AVI files: 2 of 10 played (no video, no audio)
Random AVI file: 0 of 1 played (audio, no video)
Random WMV files: 0 of 7 played (no video, no audio)
Random ASF files: 0 of 5 played (audio, no video)
Random AVI file: 0 of 1 played (audio, no video)
Random WMV files: 0 of 31 played (audio, no video)

Photo Story 2 WMV: 0 of 6 played (audio, no video)
Windows Media Encoder WMV: 0 of 3 played
Photo Story 2 WMV: 0 of 2 played
WMV created by muvee 3.5: 0 of 1 played (audio, no video)

In summery, of the 69 different AVI, WMV, and ASF video files I tried to play back on the DVX-POD only two AVI files played back properly with audio and video. In my opinion, this alone makes the DVX-POD a complete failure as a product designed to play back video.

Video compatibility is a much better story when talking about Divx files – I created a Divx video using the 5.2.1 codec and it played back perfectly on the DVX-POD. I then went to Divx.com and downloaded five different videos, and all five played without a problem. If the only thing you'll ever play back on this is Divx, perhaps it's a viable solution, but it should be capable of playing the file formats it says it can.