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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
"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.