Why no video standards?
 

Seems like every player model uses a different, sometimes only slightly differnet, video codec. Wouldn't be more sensible, and economical, to adopt a single standard? I know nobody here has any say in it, but perhaps someone has an insight into the issue...

My personal insight would be that the manufacturers are only interested in making money in the short term. They are not manufacturing players for the long term where proper control of things like firmwares and codecs are enforced, like in brandname players.

Since they are only short term manufacturers, i guess they wouldn't care much if the player uses some weird codec from the rest of the world. To them, if it works then it's ok, who cares what codec it uses?

For all you know, they could be manufacturing tupperware containers next week, if such containers becomes more profitable than players. :D

Re: Why no video standards?
 

Main problem here are copyrights and cost mixed... Chinese manufacturers started with AMV videos because AMV is a Chinese format, probably free of copyrights and cheap.
Then rockchip choose xvid instead divx due to cost of patent.
Seems that FLV patent it's not so expensive and probably supported by Google. FLV have been added in almost all players.
Only expensive Chinese player play divx, this format seems to be more costly than xvid.
Latest players have add Real video which is not so popular outside China, then patent too must be cheaper.
Expensive Chinese player have add too Quicktime video. All this formats added as a bundle!!.

Concerning rockchip who has rights over xvid, beside other Chinese chip manufacturers, some players makers for an unknown reason have choose to flip video, to make things more complicated. It could be that xvid would have put MP2 as audio encoder because this can be cheaper than with MP3. Seems that xvid / Mp2 is cheaper than xvid /MP3 which are used in more expensive players like Meizu.

Finally screen size implies a change in resolutions, which is also other complication.

As a general information the most expensive players from China are Archos. This brand plays several video formats without conversion.

Is the mp2/mp3 thing the only reason the Rockchip players can't handle normal (unconverted) xvid videos? Is there any way to save in the mp2 format natively from a program that can save in that format?

Re: Why no video standards?
 

The screen resolution has to be right too.

So if you have a 320x240 screen Rockchip player, then the video must be saved as 320x240 too, otherwise you will get "format error" message on the player when you try to play the video.

Yup, it's all about costs. It's just gotta be cheap.

As about Archos players, aren't they designed by the Germans? I had one a few years ago, and it was the best player i've ever had. Too bad it came with a faulty chip and ran down the battery in about an hour and a half till it finally died. :(

I don't get you... was the best player but died soon? :)

Archos are Chinese though... I would like to have an Archos 600 player. It must be like a dream to deal with it.!!!

Well, it was best in terms of sound quality. And with Rockbox running on it i could play games and stuff while listening to music. :D Damn, i miss Rockbox. Wish we could somehow run it on our MP4 players too.