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)."

Comments

The MusicKeg does not play Ogg Vorbis at this time

[calle42]

The Music Keg is based on the PhatBox car audio system, and neither supports OggVorbis in the car at this time. Only the accompanying Windows software lets you encode CDs into .ogg, nothing more. There's still hope though, here's a quote from the Vorbis mailing list from Vince Busam, who seems to be one of the developers of the PhatBox:

The PhatBox (and Music Keg) will support Ogg as soon as FREE libraries are available which will run on the ARM 7. If anybody is working towareds such a goal, please let me know. I can test it out on the PhatBox, and incorporate it into future upgrades.

Here is what I need to know...

[Tom7]

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"??

Music Keg DOES NOT (yet) support OGG!

[Vince]

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.

Re:DivX vs Ogg Tarkin

[hexix]

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

Can we PLEASE put this one to rest?

[wunderhorn1]

RTFM !

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.

Re:DivX vs Ogg Tarkin

[Omega Hacker]

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 ;-(