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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?"
Has everyone seen their compressed HDTV? WOW. We may not like Microsoft, but they have a nice bit of code there.
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.
...currently ;)
ermmm... don't take any notice of me... I'm too old...
Is it quality, marketing, or what that make DivX the perennial favorite, among Hollywood, consumers, or anyone else? Sure, I've got several movies encoded in DivX, but would prefer to have them in some format that I'm certain can have encoders and decoders that are legally copylefted. As always, don't think that I'm being overzealous---I'm more just curious why DivX has come closest to "hitting the big time."
Christian Jones
Medicine. Mathematics. Mediocrity.
Seriously, do we really want these forms of compression adopted? I don't know about the rest of you folks, but I want crisp, clean video. Not crap that has artifacts in it.
Life is not for the lazy.
DivX isn't really DivX anymore is it?
;) video codec it started as. Now it's basically MPEG-4, versus DVD which is MPEG-2.
I mean it's not the proprietary, pirated
This move isn't surprising to me, because I'd expect the movie industry to use the latest Standard once it became mature.
And if they have a solution ready to go, why would they reinvent the wheel?
I'm sure the next generations of DVD players will support DivX encoded discs, just as DVD players eventually came to support MP3, WMA, VCD, and CDR/RW.
I might be betraying my ignorance of, and apathy towards, video. Excuse me if that's the case.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Like its rivals, DivX offers a huge improvement in compression compared with the current TV video standard, MPEG-2, which is used by most broadcasters and in most DVDs: Using DivX, a standard 4.7GB DVD can be squeezed down to about 700MB without significant loss of quality. (Microsoft and RealNetworks claim similar ratios.)
Can anyone who uses DivX or has a DivX/DVD player hooked up to their TV attest to this?
There is still a considerable amount of negative brand name sentiment towards DiVX because of the whole Circuit City mess several years back. I remember lines of irate customers arguing with the clerks at the return lines and believe me, the arguments were intense and involved streams of explicatives. I will probably be moded down for saying so, but the HDTV compression and Windows Media formats are becoming very competitive with the more established standards like MPEG and Real. Microsoft claims that DRM will not be used to protect the owner's machine against the interests of the owner, but only time will tell the truth of those claims.
What? I know a lot of people claim Divx is MPEG-4, but I'm unable to play it in an IMSA-1 compliant player WITHOUT adding their proprietary compression codec. They may use an MPEG-4 style container, but they certainly don't use standard MPEG-4 compression.
Also, Windows Media is in no way MPEG-4. In fact, Windows Media does not even (to my knowledge) play MPEG-4 video.
-David
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I am going to take a mini ITX case, put in an AMD 2100+ processor and board, a nice all in one video card with built in mpeg2 compression / decompression, a Super DVD drive and a 120GB hard drive, hook it to a projector, and program it to play any format and to rip anything I put into it.
It will capture TV shows in mpeg2 format with the video capture cards built in hardware compression, then transcode them at it's leasure into MPEG4 format. Once it has about 10 hours of shows recorded and transcoded, it will burn them out to a waiting DVD, and send a print job to a printer to print out the new DVD label. It will also stream out audio and video to any other computer on my home network.
Once I get this all setup I will put up a parts list, a list of instructions, and an ISO image of my drive so anyone else who wants can do it too.
It amazes me that I can build my own CD/DVD player from off the shelf parts that can play formats that no store bought player will ever play. We the people have the power now. Palladium is a move to preempt us from doing this, but it is too little too late.
I already have a stand alone DVD player that plays both DivX and XVid. The LiteOn LVD-2001. DivX performance is very good, but the Xvid seems even better. A friend loaned me a CD of a movie encoded in Xvid and it is quite impressive. I suspect more and more mainstream DVD players are going to start supporting these codecs or be left behind by those that do.
Just my opinion...
adding a wrapper to their divx (good way to slow it down!) - read this for an annoying story.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
> 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.
Sure, I see this all the time... but I wouldn't go back to Laserdisc.
There are two causes for seeing this in DVD's:
1) Lousy DVD encode work.
Laserdisc had media *transferred* to it. They would (hopefully) clean the negatives, get everything aligned, and record to laserdisc. Everything was done at once.
By contrast, DVD is *captured* as uncompressed video, then (perhaps) shipped off to a *different* service bureau for MPEG-2 encoding.
Either -- or neither! -- shop might be responsible for "cleanup" on the video, such as scratch removal, etc.
Next MPEG encoding can be done "realtime" (lower quality) or as software-encoding with all the fine-tune (and slow!) knobs cranked up. Even on the fastest systems, this is an overnight job.
Lastly, the "customer" (movie owner) does not always know what they want. Will this be a DVD-5 disc? If so, the movie needs to be kept at about 4 gigs, and even that leaves little room for alternate soundtracks, languages, and "extras". DVD-5 is cheaper to manufacture so not everyone assumes DVD-9 is in the cards.
With DVD-9, you can pad the bits so a 2hr movie gets 5-6 GB. This makes a HUUGE difference in quality... less compromises, less pixelation and less chroma artifacts. The difference is like 800MB DivX video compared with 1.5 Divx video.
Its pretty easy to catch artifact noise on animated, of computer generated video. Even allowing for that, the overall quality still blows away Laserdisc.
And so far as that other guy's problem with "five minutes to fade when I FFW" well, that ain't your encoder, champ. That's the playback codec combined with the keyframe rate of the original encode. Doesn't matter what was used to encode it - if you got ten seconds between keyframes and no B frames, it's gonna take a while to settle out. If you got five minutes between'em (as lots of newbs like to do) then it's gonna take a real long time to settle.
The real irony is many "DIVX" videos out there are actually encoded with XVID (because it works better and it's free). All it takes is a switch setting in the XVID config to make it report a DIV5 fourCC, and a lot of people use this feature to avoid codec playback hassles. I used to do that too, but quit because people NEED to know there is an alternative out there.
I hope DIVX is able to make this fly (my bet is they will). The codecs are similar enough XVID will be just as compatible, which means we're free to use open source creation tools while DIVX pays the patent fees.