Why Philips DVP 3360 has problems with large DivX files

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For a long time now I'm an owner of a Philips DVP3360/12 which is a standard DVD player with HDMI output, the possibility to play DivX medias and an USB-slot. After doing some tests, I figured out, that the problem only happens, if the following characteristic is true:

- The movie size is bigger than 1GB

The movies with such a specification played fine until about 1h50~1h59 (or more or less about when the 1GB part of the file is reached) and then stopped abruptly, the DVD player switched back to the menu/file explorer. Newest firmware and even a custom firmware didn't fix this bug.

Frustrated I contacted Philip's customer support (for a second time, the first time I never got an answer). This time I chose to open an online-chat with the support department. The immediate response or question of the support surprised me: What program was used to encode the movie?
For the very first time using an online support, I actually had a good feeling. This guy knows more than an average customer support dude. In fact many encoding programs exist. I personally always used VirtualDub to convert/encode movies with the DivX/Xvid codec, but there are of course others.

By using the program MediaInfo I got the information of all the movies which met the characteristics (>1GB). The following encoding program obviously causes problems: AVI-Mux GUI 1.17.8/1.17.8.3. All of the tested movies with problems were encoded with this program.
To have real proof, I opened the affected movie with VirtualDub, selected Xvid (as the original file) as compression method and saved the new file. The new file size was slightly less than the original one but still over 1GB. What happens? The player seems to like this file and plays it fine until the end.

A big thanks to Philips's customer support for pointing me in the good direction!


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