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I got involved with DivX ;) when it was still "underground". It's amazing how far they've come. I can remember the first few trailers over at http://divx.ctw.cc/ that blew my mind (sure beat the crap out of vivo's that everyone was using). I think it is SO important to support this format and keep it going because it is a real life example of the "little guys" making it. They've had to fight against microsoft, realplayer, and the government. A lot of "purists" are still whining about the loss in quality... give me a break. These things are excellent. Most people don't have 10mb lines to leech 2 gig avi's anyway.

So do what you can to support them and we'll be one step closer to an internet that truly is multimedia compatible.

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Check out DivX ;-) . It may not be streaming video but it's a step in the right (non-Micro$lave) direction...

The capture & compression can be done in real time, my system is an AMD K7 Duron 650Mhz running on a MSI motherboard with 64Megs of ram. I usually leave the audio uncompressed, at full PCM 44.1khz stereo. I also set DivX ;-) low motion codec at 1 sec keyframes, and 6000 (max) kbps. Average compression is 26:1, somewhere near 200 KB/sec. WIth 10Gigs free, it has more than 20 hours left for recording :) I think you could get even more if you also compress the audio, in .wma at 64kbps, but a little bit faster procesor could be needed. Ah yes, the harddisk is just a Maxtor 30G IDE drive, with UDMA enabled.

I also use a little free scheduler called "Windows Scheduler" to do the automated capture (it saves keystrokes), and virtualdub itself can stop the record after certain conditions are met (like, n minutes passed, or only n megs free on disk).

So yes, your VCR is obsolete already, get a decent CPU and TV Tuner, and have a lot of fun.

Oh, and hear this tip: do the capture at YUY2 (raw) so you can enable the "noise filter", anything from the default (17?) to below (left) should be okay. You will be amazed of the magic this does with old tapes or not good enough tv signal, then choose the compression at the "compression" menu option, so to be done in real time after the raw capture and filtering.

Of course install the DivX ;-) lossy codec, and the very useful free opensource huffyuv lossless codec, use the lossy one when you need a long recording time, and the lossless when you need quality above anything else. Same with PCM (raw) audio vs mp3/wma (lossy).

BTW: Could somebody with the knowledge please take a look at VirtualDub's and huffyuv's source code? Maybe it could be ported to BeOS and Linux, now that we have the DivX ;-) Deux source at hand it could be useful. I hope video4linux 2 is ready :)

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Hmm.

The IOC bans websites from using or showing video clips, the story hits Slashdot and now free-speach advocates are getting crazy shouting that it's an infrigment of their Nature-given right to watch an event which is, by the way, international.

You know what happens next - kids with video capture cards start recording every bit of Olympic activity they can, "DivX ;-)" it and send it out on Napster and Gnutella. Oh, and don't forget those that will create hexadecimal dumps of the movies' content in text and print those on t-shirt with "The IOC can suck my dI0Ck" on the back.

C'mon, it' s pretty obvious that the IOC has learned a less on from the De-CSS episode and is seeking to improve the rating for a pretty much dying event.

I can see it already: thousands of kiddies all watching Curling just to see what the fuss is all about.

Not bad, IOC. Not bad.

[Check out this other Jesus-powered IOC]

Greg

The main link for DivX is here. There is a Linux player available, but a better one can be found here. The first one plays very badly on my Duron 600, while the second one has much lower hardware requirements and works very nicely. Both players work the same way, they use the DLL loader from the Wine Project to load the Codec, and they both require you to have the Windows binaries.

Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.

This is somewhat old news... I'm surprised it's taken so long to be mentioned on Slashdot. In fact, it was mentioned months ago in the Wall Street Journal!

Here's some sites:
http://divx.ctw.cc/
http://divx.vcdguide.com/
http://www.divx-digest.com/

A Google search on DivX ;-) will also prove fruitful. Don't forget the smiley, lest it be confused with Circuit City's failed format!

;-)

l33t's entry

Do new codecs like DIVX weeken your case? For example, now poeple can turn a 4GB DVD movie into a nicely sized 600MB file. Perfect for the average CD or fast Internet connection download. And quality isn't lost (much).

DivX, as far as I know, is a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG4 codec. The homepage for DivX is here, and not on Microsoft's site.

They should start a Napster-like service for DivX ;-) trailers, I can never seem to find any new ones on Gnutella :-)

And this isn't the sames as MP3 i.e. downloading whole tracks - the trailers may make people go out and buy DVDs.

At least, after seeing the Bullitt trailer that's what it did to me.

To the MPAA: I don't rip DVD movies. I like being raped for $8 at the movies and even more for a DVD disk I can't play under Linux. Thanks.

Can we get a few more posts on which files have actually been viewed with this? I've got everything compiled correctly but all I get is a seg fault when I try to load a DivX. I tried to sign up to the mailing list but got no response (anyone else out there have any luck with that?).

I've been messing with video since the vivo format was the best thing out there and every single time I see a DivX I am blown away with the incredible quality. The ONLY reason I reboot to winblows is to watch DivX's and I've been hoping for a video player for linux for a LONG time...

Please let me know if anyone out there has had/overcome problems trying to get this to work.

Thanks ;-)

Links:
DivX ;) Home Page
Good DivX FAQ
Great DivX Site (with a post today about *nix DivX!)

My problem is that Divx is a crib on MPEG-4 with the usual M$ intention of letting other folks do the work and we will make the money. For all of that, though if it could be hacked/reverse-engineered/etc into something more reasonable for general use, it has some promise. Severe lack of encoders (hey what else only for M$ platorms), but the ones there are seem to run a lot faster than my favorite of Sorenson for Quicktime. A couple of nice links for divx are 405 the movie which is a interesting effort by a couple of guys, here for Wintel encoders and here for a sort of general purpose site.

You can download good quality movie trailers on this.... It's "malgré tout" a bit slow on my dual-celeron500 system... i guess we'll have to wait some more :)

Divx is just an implementation of mpeg4, a low-bitrate compression that is intended for streaming video over low-bandwith lines like 56k6 modems. mpeg1 and 2 are still better, but also a lot bigge

Dude, you are just so wrong! DivX is a hack of MS MPEG-4 candidate code. It has been changed to allow it to be used in AVI files (MS only wants you to use it in ASF due to copy protection stuff) and adds in the Fraunhofer mp3 encode for audio. I believe it is VBR. This hack was possible because the MS code was available under an NDA and 'escaped'. DivX (and MPEG-4 in general) whup MPEG-1,2 ass! A standard VCD is 1374 kbits/sec, fits about an hour of 352x240 video on a CD, and looks terrible. MPEG-1 caps out there while MPEG-2 can do higher resolution/bitrates, but still aint great. MPEG-4 can easily fit about 45 minutes of 640x480 (resolution I sometimes use with TV captures) on a CD. Check out some DivX trailers and you'll see what I mean.

A lot of people claim DivX is better than a DVD (MPEG-2), which is true. Just don't expect to see than when you are stuffing the same video on one or two CDs instead of a DVD. It still looks great though.

One other thing, this increased compression is traded off with greater processing power to decompress. You could do MPEG-1 with a pentium 133 or something, but I wouldn't suggest MPEG-4 without at least a pentium 450 or equivalent.

RMS & Linus Torvalds & David Boies & the Gej (of DivX fame) & Anonymous Coward vs. Bill Gates & Jack Valenti & Hillary Rosen & Jon Katz & Steve Jobs

With the AVI / DivX codec and a DVD as source (not a TV capture or a crappy version filmed from a movie threater screen) you can make very nice-looking versions that fit on a CD-ROM. Try 'divx' on Gnutella (or IRC or whatever other distribution channel) and you'll come up with Galaxy Quest, The Matrix etc. Actually it's high-enough quality for your average computer monitor plus sound card.

So you can have a good quality movie at a size (600 MB) which people will download. Then again, /I/'d go for the DVD version, too! Way to much effort ;-)

you can use DeCSS to copy a DVD on your HD, then use some coder and DivX ti transform the DVD file into an MP4 one, check DivX site, and take also FlaskMpeg, and VirtualDUB
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BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Ok, just to set a few things straight here:

1) This has been said already, but the DivX codec has absolutely NOTHING to do with the failed attempt by Circuit City to rent out dvd's on a pay per view basis.

2) Video - Video is encoded using a hacker version of the microsoft mpeg4 codec, YES, it is similiar to asf, but before you start screaming about file size and quality being so different from asf, that is because DivX is incapable of being streamed, the entire file must be downloaded before viewing unlike asf which has the index bytes included at regular parts in the movie, the divx codec does NOT include this, resulting in smaller file sizes for the same quality (Note: I'm not sure about the technical name for the index data, but this is correct as far as i know)

3) Audio - Simple, encoded in MP3 / WMA

4) Streamin - See #2 for why this dont work

If you want to see an example of how high DivX can go for quality, get over to http://divx.ctw.cc -> trailers -> the matrix, its one of the highest quality ones online right now.
Hope this helps guys, alot of people seem to be stuck on the DivX / divx and the asf.

You get:

superb quality

STEREO 96kbit/s - 312kbit/s sound

at 10:1 size compared to DVD.

This is truly the most innovative (heh) format around. The DivX ;-) url is http://divx.ctw.cc

Ya' know, that's always bothered me... DVD-Video uses a very destructive method of compressing the video to get super-human compression, but the audio is 100% uncompressed "CD quality" audio (and often, there's more than one stream of it) most of the time. If that doesn't make the "stupid" light flash double time, I don't know what will.

[There are the "hacks" out there to blend MPEG4 video with MP3 audio, but no hardware supports it. (DivX)]