Alternatives to DivX?

VLC, duh.

what holymadness said, or MPC. those are the only two players you should ever need.

VLC will play anything you need. Ever.

VLC for everything.. the screen shot feature is awesome if you watch home videos too.

I've found KMPlayer to better than VLC, although they're both better than the standard DIVX player

CCCP http://www.cccp-project.net/

It depends on your computer and your OS. If you've got a lot of horsepower any of the freeware ones will do.

If you need to use hardware acceleration to get good performance your options are more limited. I have an H55 motherboard with an i3 on-the-cpu graphics chip and it doesn't work worth a damn with any of the free software codecs. With FFDShow it drops frames like crazy for no apparent reason. So I use windows 7's built-in codec, which supports the hardware acceleration.

Avoid this like the plague. This is product of spamville.

VLC is all you ever need. If you want an actual physical player that you can play on your TV, get Phillips DVP 5990. It reads USB drives/external HDs.

Okay....DivX isn't a player but a codec. You can use ANY video player once you have the DivX codec installed.

That being said, I think DivX sucks and prefer Xvid, a little bit higher quality and open source.

That player looks pretty sweet. How is the fast forwarding/rewinding on the USB drives?

I love my WD TV except for the fact that ff/rewind SUCKS.

It's great; multiple speeds. Haven't had issues whatsoever.

I guess I should try that again.

Windows 7 comes with most of the video codecs you need. Maybe you need something for audio, I don't know--but video, it's got it built in. You just need a player and a splitter (or whatever it's called) to use the modern container formats (like mkv, vob, avi, etc.).

At least, I think that's how it works. Anyway, there's guides online to using the microsoft codec with third-party players/audio/container stuff.

Do they routinely issue firmware updates? I came close to getting a DVD player similar to this but decided against it assuming that something that cheap would be out of date and scrapped in a year or so.

I opted for the WD TV because regardless how cheap that one is, at least I can be relatively sure there will be firmware/codec updates.