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DivX Making Hollywood Inroads
worm eater writes "CNet news reports that DivX is doing its best to become a digital video compression standard, and has been very successful in courting DVD manufacturers to adopt the DivX format. But will that be enough to beat out competing compression methods as a new Hollywood standard? It faces tough competition, such as MPEG-4, RealVideo and Windows Media. Who will win the standards race and what will that mean for the companies that push the various compression methods?"
holywood and divx in one sentence? i would think that they wouldnt link the idea of divx because it's so easily distributed and has no copy protection.
Divx *is* MPEG-4. At least one implementation of it. As far as I'm aware, so is Windows Media's video.
Divx isn't even that good a MPEG-4 codec. XVID is somewhat better, and it's free.
XviD and Ogg Theora (website seems to be down) are free (AIS) video compressor/decompressors that are designed to be comparable to DivX. The still-early-experimental Ogg Tarkin is a whole different kind of bird, but with the same general aim. For lossless video compression, there's Huffyuv (do a search). All these are open source, but the last review I read still had DivX as better quality per bitrate than the others.
Christian Jones
Medicine. Mathematics. Mediocrity.
Well, first of all, DivX 4 originally had an open source code base. DivXNetworks had a 2 system thing going on, them working on their own code, and also supporting and open source version. They changed however, amid the release of DivX 5. This is why the XviD group was formed. Their original code base was forked from the open source DivX 4 code base. Much of that has been rewritten by now though.
Also, there is an Ogg progect, called Theora, that is an open video codec. It is based off a codec called VP3 that was orignially developed by a company called On2 They gave the VP3 code to Xiph and continue to work on their own proprietary codecs, such as VP6.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
You are thinking of Circuit City's DIVX, which was a disposable DVD program. DivX is an unrelated codec, whose name, IIRC, was chosen to poke fun at the failed DVD alternative.
Well, the thing is, MPEG2/DVD is usually mastered professionally, taking into consideration individual scenes, and raising/lowering bitrates to compensate. A "still" shot, or just someone talking probably isn't going to need a lot of bandwidth, while a big fight scene is.
DiVX though has been mainly used by "consumers" who don't really know/care about any of that stuff, and just want to be able to throw in a DVD and get one a DiVX. They don't sit and tweak each scene's or frame's bandwidth requirements. Only recently did DiVX release their EKG application which allows a person to modify (inbetween VBR passes) the data allocated to individual frames. If someone (ie, a professional) really knew what they were doing, then I have no doubts they could produce an almost DVD-quality film which takes up only 700megabytes. But why stop at 700 megabytes? Using DVD media, we could get 8+ gigabytes of video/audio on a single disc. That's (theorhetically) almost 8+ hours (at "film" quality) of video. Featurettes and the like could obviously be encoded in a much lower bitrate, as they are with MPEG2/DVD's now, allowing even more room on the disc.
What we really need to be concerned with/pushing is higher resolutions. 720x480 just ain't cutting it anymore. High Def is where it's at, baby, and DiVX and Windows Media are delivering that right now. We just need a medium to transport it properly.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
As far as I understand, DivX (at least in it's most recent form) does heavily 'borrow' from MPEG4 which is not a royalty free standard (those behind DivX do not honour those royalties) which means possible future court cases.
Meanwhile, XVid provides DivX quality with a totally open source. (no 'borrowing').
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
Sheesh, DivX uses way to much overhead for so little quality, check out VP6, if you want to see real video quality.
Well it's gotta be lossy if you want HD video any time soon. I mean for a 1920x1080x24 movie you are talking 142MB/sec uncompressed. Now, even if you use a losless comrpession like huffyuv, you only get like 3:1 best case. For the sake of argument, we'll say you have a real bang up losless compresison that uses as of yet unkown methods to get an amazing 5:1. Ok so that's 28.4MB/sec (bytes, not bits). Well, that measn even for a short 90 minute film, you are talking about 150GB of storage, and that doesn't count audio, or any additonal features.
Well at this point, the only format you could ship that in is harddrive, and that'll probably remain the case for some time. Way too expensive for movies, never mind if you ahve a long one or want extra features.
So the only solution is to go lossy. Personally, I'd rather have a 1080 HD signal that uses lossy comrpession than a 720 NTSC signal that doesn't.
#75352735 - "DIVX" - dead, abandoned 10/5/2000
#75367710 - "DIVX Digital Video Networks" (logo) - dead, abandoned 12/18/1998 (???)
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
true.. but if you can compress a whole movie to fit on a DVD (to watch on the TV) with top quality it'll be good enough. Fortunately that's really easy, and the convenience factor is still there (now, if you had to swap DVDs half way through, like Laserdisc.... )
For a computer, and in the past when DVD readers weren't 30, having a whole CD on a single CD is such a big deal that as long as the quality was acceptable-to-good, people would use it.
I think people (especially geeks) don't realise this as much as they should - technological excellence (in all matters, not just video) counts for nothing compared to convenience and usability.
cheers.
However there are legacy TV reasons for this - a combination between gamma correction and the particular color space used means that there are fewer numeric codes available for encoding dark images (near the bottom tip of the YCrCb color cube - gamma pushes them more to the top) than bright ones - this can mean that scenes in dark smokey rooms (think blade runner, any sort of noir etc) tend to be more pixelated than others.
Sadly I expect directors to come to understand these limitations and avoid these sorts of scenes leaving us all in a bright colorfull world - just like the way that 50s checked ties and houndstooth jackets went out of style once NTSC was introduced - (you never saw any of your public figures or role models wearing them therefore they must be unfashionable)
Xvid is a MPEG-4 implementation, so commercial products based on it will need to pay the MPEG-4 license fee, FWIW. It's cheap.
Theora is free as in every kind of speech, beer, or anything else you could imagine. However, they haven't locked down their bitstream yet, so it's hard to say how good it will be as a codec.
Huffyuv is open source, but full of x86 assembly, so it isn't usefully portable. I'd love to see an equivalent technology that'd be more portable, and LGPL so it could be used more widely.
My video compression blog
The great thing about 2-pass xvid is that it does all that for you. One pass to see where the motion is and estimate size, and another pass to do the real encoding.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"It faces tough competition, such as MPEG-4, RealVideo and Windows Media."
Are you kidding me? Who in their right mind would choose RealVideo unless it was for some specific video settings. RealVideo isn't a choice, it means your screwed. When I must see a RealVideo file, well just installing the thing and letting them try to corrupt my system makes me feel dirty.
No, XviD is GPL'd.
libavcodec, which is part of ffmpeg, and programs like mplayer/mencoder are based-on, is the fastest, and highest quality (if you use the right options) MPEG4 encoder around.
What's with all the Xvid fanboys?
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