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

divx is ok, but...

[Restil]

Its a great codec for providing near dvd quality at a much lower bitrate than an mpeg file of the same quality. But you lose out because it takes significntly more processing power to play. It also is a hog to encode. And since its not a streaming format, it rules itself out as a live broadcasting medium.

Ogg Tarkin might have some promise, but until there's something there to play with, its not going to do me much good.

-Restil

Re:DivX Open Source?

[SenzarLarkin]

DivX is completely closed source now. Project Mayo is all but dead, the speed and quality of its encode aren't anywhere near that of DivX 4.11. Oh well. Other projects have branched off of Project Mayo, like XVid (xvid.org), that are doing pretty well, still pretty beta. Checkout Doom9.org for some more updated info

The story of divx.

[kesuki]

College kid gets into WMV Scene, starts hacking Releases 'DivX ;-)' which is two seperate version of WMV the older one 'Slow motion' and the newer one 'fast motion' and removes some other things M$ put in WMV to make it not good for High res movies.
College kid gets a lot of press, and gets sued out of existance. Domain host sells domain to a 'smarter' college kid who starts ProjectMayo and levereges all the hype to start 'OpenDivX.' Since he's not a coder, he goes out and takes an open source MPEG-4 implementation and credits it's author as per the licence agreement but violates the licence agreement in that he releases it under the "OpenDivx License" which allows him to Close Source it once people on the internet have made changes to improve it.
In the meantime he's found venture capital and even gotten good press, now he can hire programmers. He uses the "OpenDivx" license to make "DivX" a closed source Patent Pending Mpeg-4 implementation. To avoid legal problems he claims this was written from scratch -- but noone can prove that because it's closed source. This play was invented by Microsoft when they bought QDOS and used it to 'write from scratch' DOS 1.0. So the kid isn't stupid--at least he's learned from the best.
Kid needs more funding finds a friend in the creators of the mp3 codec.

The only thing I'm not 100% sure about is that the kid who got sued for DivX ;-) is really different from the one who started project Mayo. I don't see how they could be the same person though, Microsoft has more Sharks than Seaworld.