All the dvd players with a divx support logo on it has also xvid support.
xvid and divx are so closely related so theres almost 100% certainty of support of xvid as well if there's divx.

Although almost no current players out there support GMC and QPEL compression techs within xvid, but almost no releases are made to be encoded with that anyways so its a longshot

H.264 has support in some hardware dvd players, but not many and they have pretty restricted settings for decoding H.264 so it's not worth it at the moment.

But encode your dvd backups in xvid instead.

A 2GB xvid dvd resolution encode of a dvd movie yields almost identical as your original.

If you're not that picky you can go down to 2CD xvid encodes (lowered resolution) (1400MB encodes) or even 700MB depending on which television you want to watch the backups on.

But with ease and with an advantage, you can fit two dvd movies on a single layer dvd with almost no quality lost.

Try it


Many dvd movies today are sold as double layers. so unless he wants to spend time re-encoding them into MPEG2 to fit single layers, I believe he's better of encoding them to xvid and able to fit two movies on one single layer dvd instead with almost the same quality as the original.