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DivX Codec Port Contest
mr.e@home.com writes: "Flashingyellow.com has started up a contest to port the DivX MPEG-4 codec to the Macintosh platform. The goal is a completely open-sourced, cross-platform codec for use with Quicktime (hoping the Linux port of Quicktime ever gets completed). Prize is $5000 and an iMac DV Special Edition."
Before you start shouting bloody murder, read the FAQ on the page. DivX is Microsoft's implmention of the MPEG-4 video standard that has been embraced and extended. DIVX is that awful DVD scheme from Circut City. You have been warned.
Okay, just in case anybody's still confused, here's what DiVX really is: Microsoft includes a codec for MPEG 4 video compression with recent releases of Windows Media Player. I don't know how standards compliant this codec is, nor if the standard is really finalized anyway.
The problem with this codec from the perspective of your average Windows user is that it's locked to prevent it being used with even vaguely open file formats such as avi. Like the Windows Media Audio codec, you're supposed to be able to use it only with one of Microsoft's new closed file formats -- asf? -- which enforce "rights management" -- which makes it difficult to use the codecs to recompress DVDs and distribute them all over the world on GNUTELLA, which is what everyone wants to do with them.
DiVX is just a patch to the binary DLLs that relaxes this restriction, so you can create and play back avis using MPEG 4 compression. It also comes packaged with a pirated version of the fraunhoffer mp3 codec for audio, and a similarly cracked WMA audio codec in recent versions as well.
Regarding porting, it would probably be semi-easy to "port" DiVX to i386 Linux using Wine to interface with the DLL. AFAIK, Microsoft has a fairly standardized API for pluggable video codecs, and DiVX complies to this. I think a very useful and realistic project would be writing the glue to call these codecs from a linux app (Winelib has the ability to link in DLLs I think). This would give anyone using i386 Linux easy access to playback/encoding of all of the video codecs that come with Windows now and in the future, within xanim or whatever. And since the best Windows video compression program for DVD piracy -- FlaskMPEG -- is already GPL'd except for the codecs it has to link in, it would be easy to port to Linux as well. Admittedly we'd be stuck with binary codec libraries, but as all these codecs are heavily proprietary and patent-encumbered it's probably the best we can do anyway. Obviously this binary-recycling approach won't work for the contest of porting to the Mac, but frankly I think that's pretty hopeless anyway.