With the creation of DivX and XviD technology, the ability to compress both video and audio (MP3, OGG) allows us to transfer many more recordings across other smaller capacity mediums without losing much of the quality. You can now compress a full length DVD film to fit on a standard CD-R and it still looks great.
I don't refer to the Kiss player as a DVD Player, as it plays so much more. It's much better suited to be described as a home entertainment system. Out of the box it covers most common codecs; DivX 3.11+, XviD, MPEG2, MPEG, JPG, MP3 to name most. Basically if you download content from the Internet, this is most likely to play it, and at fantastic quality.
You may be thinking, why get one of these when I can watch everything on my PC? The answer is simple. The quality that this will playback compressed content will seem better on your TV, because of resolutions involved. Ever notice how a downloaded video plays in a small window? That's because that's it's native resolution. A TV's resolution is much smaller than a PC, so it won't be boxed like it is on your PC, it'll play in fullscreen and look fantastic.
The Kiss also supports subtltles in SRT format, so you can turn them on and off at the push of a button - handy for the hard of hearing.
Ths unit is also firmware upgradeable, which means that bug fixes can be added by the use of downloading the latest firmware and burning it onto a CD. You then launch the player with the CD inserted, wait a minute or so and the process is complete. This allows for playing of new content, with new codecs, and improvements in general. You can also customise this unit with your own screensavers and other great features.
The only downside with this unit is that it does NOT play the current XviD encoded releases, due to no firmware updates being released for quite some time. You can get around this by either recoding the video or buying a later version of a Kiss player.
Installation is easy, just hook it up to your TV, speakers and the power and throw in a CD with some content on. Couldn't ask for simpler!
All in all this is a fantastic unit for the price and is amazing value for money. It'll play practically anything you can throw at it and without many of the bugs you'll find in other rival players. Good if you want a cheap system to experiment on. Be warned that later models contain a hard drive and network ability, allowing you to play streaming content and store content on the machine itself - so no more CD's! Choose wisely.
More details
Ease of Use
Very Easy
Ease of Installation
Very Easy
Remote Control
Satisfactory
Instructions
Quite Helpful / Understandable
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