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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 guess this is as good a time as ever to ask: What was that screw-up concerning the openness of DivX4? All I seem to know at the moment is that they apparently were open at the beginning and then closed their stuff, basically screwing over all the contributors up to that point. Can anybody shine some light on this and tell whether that really happened?
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.
Why did they have to screw a reasonably decent codec by calling it "divx ;-)"?
...
;-)"
;-) loses again.
I can see the proposals now
Engineer's email : "Well, we could use intel's I.263 codec or we could go with Divx
PHB Thought Process: "Divx-wink? That must be some sort of in-joke... hmmm , better go for I.263..... that sounds technical."
And Divx
Why? WHY?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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
Play with my webcams and lights here
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
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.)
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!
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.
;-) 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.
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
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html