DivX;), The MPAA, The Future And The Past

Stibanater writes: "The second part of a 2-parter on Salon about DivX seems to hint at MPAA tolerance of DivX as a good distribution format. Granted, this comes from the mouth of a DivX Network's exec, so salt to taste. Still, the tasty part is the insinuation that the MPAA has learned from Napster, and will move to quickly embrace online distribution instead of 'suing it out of existence.' The first part is an explanation of DivX for the layman and a little bit about the DeCSS case." On a related note, Dan Marlin writes: "Looks like the "Internet Archive" http://www.archive.org has decided to add the DivX MPEG-4 format to it's entire movie collection. This is huge in the way of mass acceptance for the DivX ;-). It looks like they are still in the encoding process as most of movies are still only available in MPEG-2. But after scanning the collection the past few days, it looks like they are adding more daily."

Comments

Re:Movies are different than music singles

[Aggrazel]

You know, back when I had a 386 with a 150 meg hard drive and a 2400 baud modem, I would have thought that mp3 was pretty useless, since it would take hours to download one song, and then you'd have to decompress it ahead of time, and really, who'd want to store all that data for casual use?

Remember, it is not about what is, it's about what will be.

From the Ogg project -- Ogg Tarkin

[austad]

http://www.xiph.org/ogg/index.html

Here's a link to a page with some info (not much) on the Ogg Tarking video codec. You can view the mailing list archives. From the looks of it, they are going to be using a codec based on wavelets. Support this, not DivX. DivX is good for now, but in the long run we need something free and open, and I don't think DivX qualifies.