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

For a healthy dose of naivete...

[chjones]

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."

Not really DivX anymore, is it?

[foo fighter]

DivX isn't really DivX anymore is it?

I mean it's not the proprietary, pirated ;) video codec it started as. Now it's basically MPEG-4, versus DVD which is MPEG-2.

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.

Same quality as DVD?

[mblase]

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?

Re:Divx vs. MPEG-4?

[nedron]

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

Re:Do we want this?

[Winterblink]

Dunno man, I have a hard time finding things to nitpick about with those Superbit releases. Movies like Panic Room, which is a very dark colored movie, show up as damn near perfect. Usually dark flicks pixelate horribly. Every Superbit flick I've got is crisp and clean no matter what kind of visuals the director's going for.

Re:Do we want this?

[meldroc]

DVDs, DirectX and digital cable boxes all use MPEG-2 to compress the video (and yes, I've seen nasty compression artifacts in them). The real question is what tradeoff do you want to make between quality and storage/bandwidth requirements. Uncompressed video consumes obscene amounts of storage and bandwidth. MPEG-4 is better at retaining quality at a given compression rate than MPEG-2.

The part that concerns me is that Hollywood will almost certainly insist on shoving DRM (that's Digital Restrictions Management) down our throats. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't like being told what I can and can't do with the equipment I own. DRM amounts to big businesses stealing the right of people to control the hardware they own.

DivX and Xvid Player

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

And Divx is already on the way

[Snaller]

adding a wrapper to their divx (good way to slow it down!) - read this for an annoying story.