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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?"
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 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.