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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?"
whoever has the most cripling DRM built in.
Has everyone seen their compressed HDTV? WOW. We may not like Microsoft, but they have a nice bit of code there.
Took me a year of watching Divx movies to wipe away my association of the name from that failed rental system years ago...
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.
...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.
libertarianswag.com
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.
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.
What about opensource software ?
It would be nice to have something to compete with these guys.
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.
How about Theora? . . . I know.. but maybe someday.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
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
Better yet, how about upgradable players? Add whatever codecs you like/get invented?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
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.
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.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
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.
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?
Did you just use the words "DRM" and "GPL/open source" in the same sentence? I'm almost surprised that we all didn't vanish in a puff of logic.(Douglas Adams - HHGttG reference)
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
Sheesh, DivX uses way to much overhead for so little quality, check out VP6, if you want to see real video quality.
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.
#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
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...
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.
The DivX formmated has successfully courted this manufacturer. (Rubs lovingly my spindle of CD-R's)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
maybe he would have found his teacher to be more simpathetic if he'd remembered to include "\n" at the end of his argument to printf.
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
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.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
> 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.
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
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.
"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.
a good klepto, eh? ;-)
-- troutsoup.com
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.
:P
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!