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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...
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
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.
They do currently have some kind of copy control / DRM solution for renting DivX movies over the internet, involving .tix files and the 'Playa' or whatever it is called now. Whether this system is secure or not, I don't know...
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.
Well, the thing is, MPEG2/DVD is usually mastered professionally, taking into consideration individual scenes, and raising/lowering bitrates to compensate. A "still" shot, or just someone talking probably isn't going to need a lot of bandwidth, while a big fight scene is.
DiVX though has been mainly used by "consumers" who don't really know/care about any of that stuff, and just want to be able to throw in a DVD and get one a DiVX. They don't sit and tweak each scene's or frame's bandwidth requirements. Only recently did DiVX release their EKG application which allows a person to modify (inbetween VBR passes) the data allocated to individual frames. If someone (ie, a professional) really knew what they were doing, then I have no doubts they could produce an almost DVD-quality film which takes up only 700megabytes. But why stop at 700 megabytes? Using DVD media, we could get 8+ gigabytes of video/audio on a single disc. That's (theorhetically) almost 8+ hours (at "film" quality) of video. Featurettes and the like could obviously be encoded in a much lower bitrate, as they are with MPEG2/DVD's now, allowing even more room on the disc.
What we really need to be concerned with/pushing is higher resolutions. 720x480 just ain't cutting it anymore. High Def is where it's at, baby, and DiVX and Windows Media are delivering that right now. We just need a medium to transport it properly.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
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.
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