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?"

Comments

easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

whoever has the most cripling DRM built in.

Re:easy answer

[d3faultus3r]

Actually that very much depends on how consumers react to it. If the technology forces people to sign away their firstborn child and sacrifice a chicken before they can watch the movie then no one will buy stuff made with it and it will fail. It will most likely be the company that figures out how to disguise the DRM to the user but still keep enough for the MPAA to be happy that wins the standards war. I'm betting that mpeg 4 will win, due to it's support by companies that actually know how to make unintrusive DRM(Apple itunes) and the fact that it isn't nearly as bad as .wma or divx are or used to be.

I'm guessing their real advantage...

[bc90021]

...is going to be in their abillity to abuse their monopoly to force out the other codecs.

I don't foresee technical merit being a factor, unfortunately. :(

Is there opensource video compression software ?

[zymano]

What about opensource software ?

It would be nice to have something to compete with these guys.

Lossy compression.

[niko9]

Am I the only one who notices pixelation even on todays MPEG2 DVD standard?

Kinda makes the purist pine for the days of the Lasedisc.

Re:Lossy compression.

[Lumpy]

it depends....

many companies encode at low bitrates to try and fit lots of crud on one DVD.

bitrates below 7Meg per second is low quality (for a DVD) I encode my home movies at 12.000Meg per second . (But then I shoot with a Canon XL-1 so I have an awesome video quality to start with..) and friends and relatives rave about how much clearer,crisper and better looking my DVD's look compared to commercial movies.

It's the bitrate... I'm content with fitting only 1 hour and no added crud on one dvd.

Re:For a healthy dose of naivete...

[happyfrogcow]

I'm more just curious why DivX has come closest to "hitting the big time."


porn industry.

Theora

[sik0fewl]

How about Theora? . . . I know.. but maybe someday.

Re:Divx vs. MPEG-4?

[Winterblink]

Heh, if there's one thing the MPAA would never consider is a free and open solution. :)

Bet I'm not the first to say: OGG

[Atario]

Better yet, how about upgradable players? Add whatever codecs you like/get invented?

Re:For a healthy dose of naivete...

[gbjbaanb]

I always thought it was popular because of its compression ratio, a whole movie on a CD... that's what did it. IMHO.

All the other features.. no big deal really.

Video and Audio Codecs

[SnowWolf2003]

There seem to be 3 factors that will eventually determine who wins out:

1. Quality - If it is compressed it still needs to be good quality
2. Widespread adoption - If you can't encode and decode it wherever you want to use it, then it won't work for you.
3. Portability/Restrictions - Finding the right balance between copy protections wanted by the MPAA/RIAA and the portability wanted by the consumers.

Re:Microsoft has a real advantage here

[Anonymous Coward]

You are seeing the benefits of encoding. They spent time and care to encode those video examples and the product appears a lot better for it. Without that extra care, you would see the performance limits of WM9, like other MP4 variations. Microsoft knows the value of a good demo. Unfortunately, the practical use of the codec in the market will look noticeably worse. You can't shove an elephant through a straw without doing some serious damage.

Xvid is the best.

[incom]

It performs well on low end hardware, and has excellent video quality(best I've seen in compressed video). Divx is significantly slower at high quality settings, and with slightly more artifacts. I believe xvid is LGPL too! Too bad without some lobbying money it doesn't stand a chance for Hollywood.

Let the market decide

[rwa2]

Do we really need "a" standard? What's wrong with the current proliferation of divx, mpeg-X, quicktime, avi codecs? People will just start using the ones that give them the quality/attributes they want, and the best performing codec will come out near the top.

Plus, the more codecs there are, the higher the chances that MPlayer will become "the" "standard" movie playing software, since it's probably one of the few that can play almost all of them! :P

Re:Microsoft has a real advantage here

[Joe Tie.]

Firstly, comparing the quality of codecs by samples downloaded from the internet is a very bad idea. Well, unless it's by someone providing samples of a comparison study who knew what they were doing. And unfourtunatly most people encoding files into real media, or quicktime (with the exception of studios) don't have a very strong grasp of what they're doing. Not to mention a lot has to do with what media is being compressed. I've seen people on doom9 get better results with real encodes than they did with xvid or divx at comparible bitrates, mostly with anime or cartoons. But certainly at the same bitrates, people have been able to get quite comparable results with real on live action these days. As for the cpu load with the matrix trailer, I don't know what to say about that. I'm only on a 850mhz with 128MB ram and it played fine for me in Linux with mplayer.