Slashdot Mirror
Good News On Two Open-Codec Fronts
davidu writes: "The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany (makers of the mp3 codec) licensed the divx ;-) video codec for future use. This is good for users because the codec is open source and is now on its way to becoming a standard. For those who don't know, this is unrelated to the failed Circuit City program, hence the smiley. ;-)" On the audio side of things, Mike Hicks writes: "Saw this on LWN's Daily Updates. Kenwood has come up with a car audio playing system that understands the Ogg Vorbis compression format, the Music Keg. Me want.. Time to start digging for spare change in the couch ..." Update: 02/05 03:24 GMT by T : Two clarifications below put a slight damper on each of these, though the overall news is still good.
Vince Busam from Phatnoise writes: "The author of the mp3newswire article goofed big time! Nowhere does it state that the Keg plays Ogg files, only the desktop software. Ogg will be supported when free ARM libraries are available. The author is further incorrect when he mentions the Kenwood X959 plays MPEG video files on the tiny OLE display. I have no idea where he got that idea." And reader Guspaz points out: "OpenDivX is indeed opensourced, but it is not the same as DivX 4, which was what was liscenced (And is what people download to use)."
I thought DivX ;-) was just a repackaged version of Microsoft's MPEG-4 codec. ("Version 3")
I seem to recall that some folks were writing a new codec and using that name (presumably to get free publicity, I mean, who will sue them?), and also making it open-source. ("Version 4")
So why does Fraunhofer need to license this new codec if it's open source? And why is it "patent pending"??
Nowhere does the Kenwood Music Keg (PhatNoise PhatBox) claim to support Ogg. The author of the article must have mis-read some of the literature which clearly states that Ogg is only supported in the (Windows) desktop software. The author also overstates the capabilities of the Kenwood X959, which does NOT play mpeg files, just short animations which can be loaded into the head unit's memory via CD-Rs.
The Kenwood Music Keg runs Linux, and can be upgraded to support Ogg when free ARM decoding libraries are available. Also, there are Linux utilities for managing playlists on the Music Keg.
The reason these guys don't support Ogg on the decoder end yet is that they're waiting for a free port of the Vorbis codec to the ARM7. Apparently, several ports exist but all are commercial and require a license fee, which Kenwood appears to be unwilling to pay.
No, but replacement 30G cartridges are available at http://www.phatnoise.com/
Divx4.x != Open source, where (X > 0).
You are correct- the newest sourceson proectmayo are 8-12 months old, and several revisions behind what the current state of development.
Divx4 is genereally regarded as a lesser-among-equals among the high-quality MPEG4-alikes. Better than VP3 and WM8, but slightly more blurry than properly done SBC Divx3.11 (Using a program like Nandub or Gordian Knot), in addition to the licensing issues with divx4 (and a lot anger over the code-hijack that divxnetworks, inc. pulled). There's a few new codecs in development that are very promising, but not quite ready for prime-time.
The original version of divx [ divx ;-) ] was a hacked version of the MS MPEG-4 codec with data-rate and play time restrictions removed.
;-) content. Aside from being perfectly legal, it also adds goodies such as VBR and multi-pass encoding.
The project mayo codec (Divx 4.x) was a complete re-write from scratch based on the MPEG-4 specification...fully backwards compatable with divx
The article, though desribed poorly on slashdot, is stating that DivxNetworks (The people now behind project mayo) have licensed their divx 4.x codec to Fraunhofer Germany, not the other way around.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Divx ;-) with the smiley is version 3.* and is a hack of a microsoft codec. what we are talking about here is DivX4 by DivXNetworks http://www.divx.com/ it is completely different, it is incompatible, and is not a hack of any other codec. the similarities are that they both have similar names and both are based on mpeg4 technology.
Tarkin is nowhere near complete and is not very usable yet.
:)
I have no clue where Tarkin is at but this was posted to Gnome's desktop-devel list today:
Subject: Cool news of the Day
From: Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
Hi dudes,
I just wanted to let you all know that as of yesterday GStreamer has
support for encoding and decoding of Ogg Tarkin video. So now you can
convert all your DivX movies to Ogg Tarkin with the help of GStreamer.
I also think that makes the GStreamer mediaplayer the first mediaplayer
to support Ogg Tarkin
Christian
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
The problem is that ARM does not support floating point and the standard, free ogg implementation is heavily reliant on floating point. There is, apparently, a non-free implementation of ogg that is integer only. But, being non-free it isn't freely available.
This lack of an integer Ogg codec is a major problem because the vast majority of dedicated mp3 devices are ARM based. Until integer Ogg is freely available, we aren't going to see much support for Ogg beyond our computers.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Q: Is the OpenDivX(TM) codec the same as the DivX(TM) codec?
A: Yes and no. Yes, they are both versions of DivX compression technology. The OpenDivX codec was launched as an open-source project on Project Mayo in January 2001. Today, the project continues as a collaborative, educational development effort, focusing more on improving visual quality than optimizing performance. The latest generation of the DivX codec (version 4.x) was released in July 2001. The new DivX codec is technically completely different from OpenDivX, and is built from a different codebase. It has been optimized for greater performance and visual quality and has more features than OpenDivX. It's important to note that the two codecs produce compatible formats, meaning content encoded with OpenDivX can be played back with DivX, and vice versa. The DivX codec will from now on be the version with the most new features and widest compatibility across platforms, so this is the version we recommend you use.
Q: Is DivX(TM) video technology a hack of Microsoft code?
A: Absolutely not. A lot of people seem to think we're not making ourselves clear here, so pay attention: the DivX(TM) codec is a patent-pending (as in, patents owned by DivXNetworks) technology created from scratch (as in blank screen, blinking cursor) by DARC (the DivX Advanced Research Center) and the team at DivXNetworks. We hope this puts that issue to rest.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
If you want streaming "DivX" then just use real MPEG-4 (Quicktime) ... DivX is just a name for MPEG-4 compressed video stored in the crappy (2GB limit, no timestamps, no VBR audio suport) unstreamable AVI format.
As a lead GStreamer developer, and someone very interested in Tarkin, I must point out that what was added was a plugin to "w3d", a candidate technology for Tarkin. There is no Tarkin codec, yet, and won't be for some time, as there is still heavy research into what the best type of codec is for this task. w3d is just one of many attempts to make something workable, albeit the most successful so far. Unfortunately, my hint that the plugin should be called "w3d" was ignored ;-(
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
The Dixv codec was licensed by Fraunhofer IGD (here in Darmstadt, next building) which has little to do with the Fraunhofer IIS (in Erlangen) the co-inventors of MP3. So, yes it has been licensed but nothing to "drool" about :-)
(appended to the end of comments I post, 120 chars)
BTW, you need to type in the full url http://www.xvid.org to access the XviD site. http://xvid.org does not work.