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Divx Now Adware Supported Only
bogomip_bandit writes "The divx codec is no longer free, no strings attached. Until recently, when downloading the codec from divx.com, one could select Dr Divx for a price, Divx Pro for a price, the divx codec for free, or the divx codec with bundled adware to help support divx development etc. Recently the site has changed. Now when one visits the download page, the only free codec you can download is adware supported. This means even to just watch divx movies and not do any actual enncoding, one has to install adware on their machine. I for one will be finding a different video codec." Sounds like a good reason (if you needed one) to look curiously at Ogg Theora. Update: 08/20 20:04 GMT by T : Correction: As several readers have pointed out, the bare codec is still available, it's just listed below the payware / adware versions.
There is a link to download the divx codec (no cost) without the adware below the three main choices. the url is:
http://download.divx.com/divx/DivX505Bundle.exe
Go together like toast and butter. Looks like some of us are going to have to go out and find girlfriends now...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Anyone volunteering to do for DivX what Kazaalite did for Kazaa?
You think you don't need to pay for things? Good luck with that.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
There's always ffdshow, a sourceforge project that includes both divx and xvid.
Well, that's all well and good, but alas, the pr0n websites continue to use DiVX. What are we to do?
On the linked download page, under the Dr. Divx/Divx Pro, in a normal text link it says "Download the DivX codec (no cost)" which is NOT the Adware version.
Having to scroll down a bit and click a text link is such a PitA...
I think you might be missing something: Check here.
The codec itself is not adware supported. It appears the only thing they've changed is the layout of their downloads page - they've de-emphasized the free codec download, but it's still there.
Heaven forbid that the developers might want some compensation out of their efforts.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Oh well i use xvid anyways.
75% of all statistics are made up!
Well, not exactly ;) But the point is it's only the Win32 version that follows this 'pricing' format. Freed download of the 5.0.5 codec for Mac and Linux are still available.
DivXNetworks, IIRC, closed the source on an originally open project. This is just the (albeit rather belated) final stage in their evil plans.
:)
Anyway, DivX sucks! I can't quite see why anyone would bother with it when XviD and FFMPEG are available, both offering vastly superior picture quality. Still, I suppose DivX has the most bullshit and adware, ergo greater end-user appeal...*sigh*
iqu
Download and install the full-featured, adware-equipped divx codec. Then, run Adaware to find and remove all the Gator and other adware that is part of the divx package. All the divx with none of the crap!
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
We all got hooked on Divx. The Divx people know it. It will take at least a year for the effects of this to reverse itself and for the Divx encoders/users to switch to another format. Let's hope the Ogg folks come up with a viable alternative, or hey... why not just stick with what we have now until we can reverse engineer it into a OSS clone?
put the what in the where?
Interested to know whether the Slashdot editors validate incoming information to see if what the poster is stating has any truth to it.
<sigh>
Why not just use the VideoLAN Client?
It does a lot more than I will ever need it to.
You can still download the player codec for free, no adware. The *encoder* has been ad-supported for a while I think. They just shuffled the links around.
The codec download just moved right below. "Download the DivX codec (no cost)" still just gets you the codec with *no* adware at all. The three options on the top are Dr Divx(pay), Divx Pro(pay) and Divx Pro(adware). They moved the codec and player to the text link to make space for Dr Divx. That's all.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
From their faq:
Q: This is great. When will it all be finished so I can use it right now, like this minute? Please?
A: Ogg Theora was scheduled to go Beta (that means the bitstream is locked down, and all features are represented) in March of 2003. Obviously, that's slipped. Alpha 2 is going to be released shortly; but please remember that until Beta, there is no promise that files you encode will be supported in the final release.
Q: Can I use Theora to encode stuff right now?
A: Yes, but we strongly, strongly recommend against it, for anything but test-cases. This is not a full release in any sense of the word, it is simply a milestone, and if you start encoding things right away, there's a really good chance that it will break when you try to play it with tools we release when the final version is released.
Right.
DivX 5.0.5 is still available for Linux here, no adware attached. Actually, it would be quite funny if adware was included as that would be the first case of linux adware afaik.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I've not seen Ogg Theora in action, but I have seen xvid do wonders. I'm sure there are many other options.
The problem is just getting people encoding the video to realize what a pain in the ass it will be for the end user to view the video they are encoding. If they've been using divX, they're going to continue to do so especially if they've actually purchased the software.
i could not think of anything clever.
it's amazing that not even the submitter reads the article. At least he mentioned an open source project to get posted.
Way to go slashdot!
VLC, IIRC, uses the superb FFMPEG library for MPEG4-compatible-encoded video playback. Thus it is, fortunately, unaffected by this little bit of evilness.
:)
VLC, for those unaware, is a superb piece of cross-platform video-playback software, notably allowing region-encumbered DVDs to be played back on different region drives (certainly on Windows, anyway) and playing a load of formats to boot.
iqu
Why do the Ogg people keep coming up with such stupid names? Ogg Theora? It sounds like a female character from a bad Star Trek movie. Ogg Vorbis would be her husband.
I mean seriously, what sounds more professional when you're proposing something to your manager: "We should use Ogg Vorbis!", or "We should use MPEG Layer 3". I know which one I'd rather be saying to my boss.
This space intentionally left blank.
I mean, it would take 3 seconds to check the validity of this! I can't believe crap like this gets through, and stories that are actually worth reading are rejected over and over again. I know its horribly off topic, but I only wish everyone would make their PHB's read the link.
How can I use my mod points to rate this entire article 'WRONG'? :)
DivX 4/5 ist MPEG4 compliant, so you don't need the DivX 5 decoder to watch an MPEG4 stream whose creator happened to use the DivX 5 encoder..
It's an interesting idea.
First, you get the early adopter types to use it and spread it around by offering it for free. These same people start using it to encode movies, because they're techy types.
Once it hits the mainstream, offer multiple versions -- free, so that techies can still get it and propogate it, and ad-supported, so that nontechs who want the "extra" (ie useless) features will watch the ads.
Eventually it becomes so common within the mainstream community that you feel you can lose the free version -- the techies will move on to something else, or keep using their old free version, but the established mainstream use will keep growing -- and so will the ad revenue.
I don't LIKE it, but it certainly seems to have worked. Imagine how difficult it will be to wean our nontechnical family members to a new codec... "But you said DivX was better than all the others, and I don't care about the ads!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So something is good until someone starts trying to recoup the costs of their investments? Come on folks, get real. Codec development is costly, in addition, so is having it downloaded by millions. Perhaps if more people were willing to give back to projects they wouldn't be forced to do such.
scott
This reminds me of the real player. http://www.real.com/ - It's fun to watch someone find the real player. It's even more fun to watch that person get absolutely infuriated as the real player sets itself to load during startup and just be a general pain in the ass. Fun times.
no alarms and no surprises, please.
Sure, free, no ads. Except for the "Buy QuickTime Pro now?" popup every time you launch it. But at least there aren't any ads.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
Yes it does. Actually, it would be more correct to rephrase "adware" with "spyware" since software developed by Gator or Digital Brliiance actually spies on you, instead of simply showing ads (as any normal browser would do while browsing the web: in that sense, browsers are 'passive adware').
Obviously, DivX staff would never do that since "spyware" would turn off a lot of potential downloads. However, EULAs aren't very informative on what kind of activity you are permitting this software to do in exchange for you right to use DivX Pro. If it's true that programmers should get something out of their hard work (and DivX devs should with doubt), it's also true that the user should be correctly informed and be allowed to completely opt-out if he wishes. No Gator or Digital Brilliance program allows you to do that.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
You need to have a compiler that can make DLL's. Just create a program that exits as soon at it starts. Run adaware and compile it to a DLL. Copy and rename it to the ones adaware just removed. I can only get it to work with the decoder only. It won't work if you want to encode video.
Small correction: Vorbis is for audio, Ogg is the moniker for a suite of codecs from Xiph, including video and speech-specific compression.
Hee-hee. Dying tickles!
First he was responsible for the Decipher "book review" (where the reviewer gave away the whole story) and now this completely incorrect article.
Isn't anybody in the Slashdot ruling class paying attention to this crap!?!?!?
Am I right, here, people? Back me up, hah?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
ok, here's a rant; mod be into oblivion if you like, but i think some users will agree with me here.
windows media player seemed to be the best player for all kinds of video content while any linux player was, well lacking, mainly with codec support. i remember when windows media player would auto-download a codec and everything worked great.
lately, i'm having a hard time playing many video files in windows media player and the auto-download codec thingie is a freakin joke. i don't know how many different codec installers i've been thru trying to make sure all codecs are covered (god knows how much adaware software has been deployed on my xp machine in the process).
frustrated, i've turned to linux for video viewing. i installed mplayer with the gmplayer front end and the w32 codec file.
now, i can play any codec thrown at me. quicktime? windows formats? no problem.
also, there's no better satisfaction then when my friends say to me, 'hey, i can't seem to play this video file you gave me.. how did you see it?'
'with linux.' (did their job just drop? yep, it sure did!)
"Oh! Never mind...."
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Posted by timothy on Wed August 20, 02:42 PM
from the neither-factual-nor-new dept.
FFDSHOW is one Directshowfilter and plays em all:
XVid, DivX3.11, 4, 5, WMV, HUFFYUV, MPG uva...
Get it and forget about DivX...
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
timothy takes it well. "As several readers have pointed out" is in the update. What he wanted to say was, "as several barking assholes have bitched, moaned, and puled about (rather than noticing that someone else already said it and leaving well enough alone)..."
Yeah, mod me down for my superglue-to-buttcheeks maneuver if you will, but I'm right. Christ, people fuck up sometimes, no reason to reason to fill the thread with, "Dur, the link's right there, dur the link's right there!"
This is not correct. Just get the 3ivx codec which is currently $free (but not free as in speech) that plays DivX, XvID and 3ivx flavours of MPEG-4 encoded video and has no spyware. It's available on windows, mac, linux, beos and amiga. Get it - it includes both encoder and decoder, and on windows it installs an AAC (advanded audio coding) directshow filter so you can watch those MPEG-4 compliant videos with MPEG-4 compliant AAC audio streams in WMP. I never installed DivX on my machine but watch DivX video all the time thanks to this.
And I have seen comparisons showing that the post-filtering if 3ivx actually shows divx and xvid videos better than their own native codecs. YMMV.
(Note: Please don't quote the doom9.org comparison that said 3ivx encoding was terrible. This is only because the tester used terrible settings for the encoder since the 3ivx team did not respond to their request for good settings.)
Doesn't the correction make this a non-story?
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
There's a file in one of the folders (Divx Codec i think) that contains a file "gain_trickler.exe" which is set to startup in the windows registry. Just delete the entry in regedit and delete or rename the file. (I'd give exact instructions, but I'm at work now with no access to the program...it's not hard to figure out though.)
It is absolutely shameful that this was posted. It is hard to believe that /. editors couldn't even be bothered to scroll through the entire download page to see that there is still a link for the fee codec.
That being said, this does show how vulnerable we are to "bait and switch" methods. Divx has been widely adopted because it was free. If all of a sudden we DID need to pay money or have adware on our PCs to use the newer version, it would cause problems.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Yeah, of course old non-adware versions of the divX codec will still be available for a while, but the point is that there won't be any new non-adware versions except the ones you have to buy.
XviD is a great alternative, which looks just as good as DivX (About 5mb per minute gets you very good quality if encoded properly. 10mb per minute is near DVD quality.)
It's completely free and GPL'd, and it's also already very popular, by my estimates its the second most popular codec, behind DivX, for the (ilegal) online distribution of movies and TV shows, unlike Ogg Theora which is completely unheard of fringe experimental codec that no serious group has ever used for a release.
XviD source code
Nic's XviD binary (best)
A divX digest page with links to several other, older XviD binaries
Repeal the DMCA!
Who actually cares shit about DivX? We've had ffmpeg for some time! If you are honestly watching videos using windows system.. You need ffdshow directshow filter (yes, it's based on ffmpeg).
WHY are there headlines like this on the front page? For those who are looking for encoder, mplayer comes with the famous mencoder. If my memory serves me right, latest stable (pre-)release supports latest xvid and DivX encoding options.
-rzei
Some hacks? It's not that hard to remove the adware for even an average computer user who understand the whole "executables" deal. To completely remove it, I believe it requires mucking in the registry but if the program isn't "there" when windows tries to "run" it, then it won't get "run"
Unless of course there is some reason that this is a smarter-than-average adware thing (oxymoron??) in which case when you try to delete it it causes the Y2K bug to be summoned out of hibernation and bitch slap you.
Either way...might as well give it a shot.
If you want to watch movies, this is the codec to use. Nothing even comes close. And, as conner said, it's open source :)
The whole thing was proved incorrect anyway, so why keep it on the front page?
XViD is on the path to surpass DiVX, being rapidly developed open source.
Nothing is different for the end-user's experience. Encoding is a teenie bit more flakey than DiVX, but I'd expect it to have surpassed DiVX within a year in the quality/compression department.
Now only if we can drum up enough support to put Real and QT out of business. >:-)
http://www.xvid.org/
Ok, bit of history lesson, from the way I heard it. Back in the day, DivX 4's dev team (Project Mayo) split up, half becomming what is now DivX, and the other half becomming what would later be called the XviD team.
:) )
:)
Basically, the DivX guys seem more concerned with becomming a closed source but open standard group right now, and making DivX into the next VHS/DVD type standard. XviD seems to be the flip side, free software, version of the coin.
(I should point out that this is just what I heard, and I've also heard things as absurd as that DivX is just a pirated copy of Microsoft's implimentation of MPEG4, and that SCO apparently owns UNIX, Linux, Florida, the plans to the Death Star, and my mother, so, grain of salt, eh? In other words, I might be off in my history lesson. but hey, that doesn't stop Bush, so why should it slow me?
AAAANYWAY. XviD is a MPEG4 codec, much ilke DivX (indeed, DivX and XviD can play each other's files) but XviD is completely open source, liscensed under the GPL.
So, if you are truely fed up with DivX -- and I don't see why you would be, they're just trying to make a living -- you could also go get XviD instead. It's still beta, but it's quite nice. Fast, Slightly smaller files, and has a lot of features DivX doesn't. (Like setting credits to encode in black and white, or in a much lower quality; or intelligently encoding part of the screen at different quality levels depending on how busy that part of the screen is)
Lately, one of the neat tricks I've seen is to use XviD and OGG audio, and combine them in some weird way. Insted of AVI files, you get OGM files, which are *much* neater. OGMs can hold more than one audio stream (English / Japanese, switch at will) and as many subtitles as you want, making them really much closer to the "nifty" factor of DVDs. But I'm no video editor, so someone else would have to chime in on OGMs.
Anyway. Go give XviD a try here. http://www.xvid.org/ If you can't compile you're own source, do a search on Yahoo for "Xvid Binaries" for user made binary installers. I like Koepi's or uManiacs for Windows, myself.
This is yet another twist to the many different kinds of software that tries to get users to actually PAY for the product (and who can blame them?).
It used to be we have shareware - the pay-by-the-honor-system system. Then came the time-trial shareware, which expires after the trail period, then came the nag-ware, which pops up with windows reminding you to register your software, crippleware, which had features that were disabled or functionality limited, then came the adware, which allows you to use the software as long as you were willing to put up with seeing ads.
So now, if you combined these (in DivX's case, it's adware and crippleware - the free version has lower quality/less features), you get Distasteful-Free-Alternatives-Ware.
Of course, Open/Free software is ultimately better. I say they should combine more of these alternatives to really give us the choice! I think DivX should also add a full-featured (non-crippled) time-trial version, and a nag-ware version just to complete the whole set. Let US decide which one we want to be annoyed by before we finally give up and go to a free alternative or (gasp!) actually cough up the money and purchase the full version.
FYI, I purchased the pro version of DivX because quite frankly, I watch enough DivX5.05 video files for me to justify it. For me, it was good old shareware - the pay-by-the-honor-system system. Of course, I never considered the adware version even for a second.
Wrong. Unless you use Linux/x86. Linux users of non-x86 platforms are not welcome:
And as you can see the source code is not available.Less is more !
Another alternative is On2 ( www.on2.com )'s VP_ family of codecs. If you recall, VP3 is the basis of the Ogg Theora codec. It released VP3 extremely liberally, explicitly allowing others to profit from it or anything derived from it. Recently VP4 was released for "Personal Use". I'm not sure exactly what that means, but you _can_ download it and encode easily and quickly.
http://on2.com/vp4.php3
They currently sell their VP5 and VP6 codecs, which I feel are absolutely amazing. VP4 gets near DVD quality under a megabit, VP5 pwns VP4, and VP5 is a 40-50% improvement on processor foot print. Granted, I interned with them for a bit, but they truly do rock, even if I am biased.
www.olin.edu
I'm pretty disturbed by the fact that:
I mean, I know Slashdot isn't the New York Times. I know it's fun to laugh at the lousy jobs the editors do, and the lousy job the people submitting stories do, and how awful people's spelling and grammar are, but c'mon! This is getting ridiculous.
If OSDN can't afford to hire editors, fact checkers, or anything else, try to recruit volunteers! Do it like the moderation system. Allow random users to see stories that are about to be posted and fact check them. You could have "verified true" and "verified false", then "metaverification" to keep the fact checkers honest.
I'd be happy to check the facts and the grammar of a few stories a month for free, in exchange for others doing it the rest of the time. Isn't that the whole idea of Open Source? Many eyes, few bugs? One person's effort helping thousands more?
Of course, you could always use a better MPEG-4 codec that happens to be open source, like XviD, or ffmpeg. When I started ripping DVDs, I compared DivX 5.0.5 to XviD to ffmpeg, and IMO XviD provided the best quality (although all three are very close together ... ffmpeg was the fastest but lost some quality compared to the other two).
When you consider that XviD and ffmpeg are open sourced, why would anyone use DivX 5?? (of course, this is using *nix as your OS, but according to the ffmpeg homepage you can use ffmpeg under Win32 as well ...)