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XVID 1.0 Released
Freedom66 writes "The 1.0 version of XVID codec is available. XviD is an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec like DIVX codec. It's an open source project which is developed and maintained by lots of people from all over the world. On the 31st December, Doom9 has made a codec comparison and XVID was at this time, one of the best codecs."
if you just want to download a codec so you can play movies (eg, with wmp) , go here.
(i use mplayer for win32 now, so i don't use this anymore)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
For Windows users, grab a compiled binary of XviD 1.0 Final with a nice installer at Koepi's Media Development Homepage. A lot easier than going through xvid.org as due to copyright issues they only host the xvid source, which must be compiled manually.
Hardly, considering xvid started life as an open source replacement for divx.
DRM is normally done at the packet level, not the codec level. One could easily apply, say, Windows Media or Intertrust DRM with a file encoded with XVID. XVID doesn't have any meaningful effect on DRM pro or con.
Since XVID is a MPEG-4 Part 2 codec, any DRM system that can encrypt MPEG-4 can do XVID-encode files.
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DivX and XviD ;-) are different codecs altogether--that's like saying that Quicktime is Real Media in a silver box rather than a green one.
That's why Xvid.org doesn't release binaries. There is something somewhere that states that you can't compile it unless you have a licence for Mpeg-4. So, they release the source and expect you to compile it. That's also why sites like this exist, where you can get binaries.
eclecti.cc
If I remember correctly from DOOM9 forums this is done intentionally to avoid any troubles with MPEG-4 licensing. Whole XVID development is "purely for educational purposes".
And where do you expect them to get the money to pay the patent licenses they'd need? By releasing only source code, they get considered an academic research project and don't have to pay for the patent licenses.
If XviD wanted to compete with DivX, they'd also have to pay MPEG licensing fees and charge for their product. No thanks.
You can get Windows Binaries Here. If you notice, they provide no binaries for any operating system on their website. There is probably some legal reasons for this. The LAME MP3 encoder also provides no Windows Binaries on their site, yet LAME is a very popular MP3 encoder simply because it is superior to the commercial ones.
Well, since it is MPEG-4 conformant, it is supported commercially. QuickTime can play xvid encoded movie files with the included MPEG-4 plugin. I haven't tried many other players, but as long as their MPEG-4 implementation isn't completely borked, then they should play it as well.
DRM is wholly different from the codec. Anyone can take and make a DRM wrapper around MPEG (and hence xvid) without too many problems. An analagous example would be Apple's DRM around AAC (which is part of MPEG-4, I believe).
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
There are three major distributions of XviD. Koepi's is the most popular, because his Windows compiles used to be considered the fastest; it is the one that has been posted above several times already.
xvid.org's legal reasons for not providing a binary download are explained on the internet. If you don't want to deal with any of this, fine, but XviD is a damn fine codec, and I use it for every application where Divx 3 and Divx 5 _USED TO_ make sense, so if you want to see anything I encode, you're going to have to deal with it sooner or later. And there are many of us who use it just because of the licensing fees involved in using other codecs.
Finally, you have the alternative of downloading ffdshow on windows. Other codecs can decode Xvid, but ffdshow's is a very good non-official XviD decoder that can also decode many other formats.
As you seem to have figured out, MJPEG is a pretty common choice for applications that want very high video fidelity. If your embedded hardware is lightweight but does DCT, this makes good sense. But if your "embedded" hardware is really a semi-decent general purpose CPU, it probably makes sense to go for mpeg2. You can get fidelity comparable or better than mjpeg within less bytes. Depending on the video's resolution, anything close to 6-10Mbps is quite excellent. For comparison, DVD bitrate is typically around half this, yet obviously it can still achieve great fidelity. So 6-10Mbps is usually a bit on the high side for mpeg2 video.
The Ogg formats are also something to look into, and they are more for full A/V quality compression. Certainly a candidate for me.
Audio, yes. Video and container format, no. The video implementation is basically a no-show, and I'm not expecting anything too great in the future. The container format is not especially terrible but it's nothing to crow about either.
Also, your above statements seem to indicate you don't care a whole lot about the video's size. Then why should you care so much about the audio's size? Either way the audio will pretty much always be a fraction the size of the video. I find it very confusing reading your post, it's very hard to tell what benefits you're looking for. Vorbis audio is wonderful if you want very low bitrates. If you care little about bitrates, the difference will be too small to notice, though.
Obviously encoding to an mpeg4 format lets you put nearly-equivalent quality video in the same amount of space, but the encoding time is at least several times higher. You have to ask yourself where you want to be on the CPU vs. Storage tradeoff spectrum. Personally I think XviD is a close second place to libavcodec's DivX implementation, btw.
Most DVD players can't play MPEG-4 at all. DVDs and SVCDs are both MPEG-2.
DivX 5 was once Open DivX 4, but then they desided to go closed source again, and a fork of Open Divx 4 was made, which is what we now know as Xvid.
Yes, but it comes with a lovely annoying watermark that sits on your videos for 10 seconds or so every time you play them - and not just one DivX encoded files, that would be too easy, it does it on just about every file that DivX can play back (Including Xvid, amusingly, if you installed DivX more recently).
MPEG4 is just a format for how the data is stored and how the data should be read by the decoder. That's why you can use a DivX decoder for Xvid, MS MPEG4, 3ivX, etc. Each of these uses different algorithms inorder to come the final MPEG4 data standard. Some algorithms are better than others, so some codecs are therefore better.
The answer is: that depends which encoding options were used, and which the player supports!. There are a vast number of options, but to make this understandable to the user, we have what are called "profiles". a common target is "advanced simple profile", IIRC, which is a base level of features that most players support. these can be selected as presets within the encoder config, to make things easier. many players, for example, do not support GMC or Qpel. this is not a disaster. for more details on what this means please see a good site such as Doom9. some players also have stuttering problems when certain parameters are exceeded. to avoid this i'd recommended to make encodes yourself (which you should be doing from your own DVDs under fair use anyway!) to ensure quality control and playback on your systems. Doom9 have an excellent forum for asking questions such as this, but your Q will probably mostly be answered in the FAQs first :) be warned there's quite a learning curve. I don't yet have a standalone player but i have some experience encoding for PCs and am considering purchasing one when I next buy a DVD player.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
Newer versions of the codec regularly crash when encoding video via all versions of Vegas Video. Sorry, just ain't gonna happen.
You briefly metioned OGG in the above and OGG itself isn't a codec, its a wrapper. OGG Vorbis is an audio codec that is quite good but a totally free video codec is still only in early development. That being said the OGG or OGM has some great features. A very interesting one is the ability to encode the differences in audio streams and therefore save sometimes considerable space. It is currently used most ofter with XVID but can be used with pretty much any video (or even audio) codec. http://www.doom9.org might be able to help you for with some of this stuff. As far as the What would i do with a clean slate, i would probably use OGG with vorbis as the audio and xvid as the video... there may actually be problems with xvid and the law but i don't really know about that. Good luck.
Burn Bright or Fade Away
You can turn the watermark off, even on the free version. It does it to tell the person that it is being used to play the file. If you use DivX to decode XviD files you'll get that watermark, and yes you can get DivX to not play XviD.
Towards the storage-heavy end of the cpu/storage spectrum, you could check out HuffYUV, a lossless video codec. It is especially handy if you have little CPU power and absolutely need a lossless codec, since it seems to compress to a higher ratio and at a faster rate than any other lossless codec available. Also, it's free, so have fun with it.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
does it matter if the codec isn't used commercially?
It doesn't matter.
In fact at one point, Sigma Designs was caught stealing Xvid code for their hardware players
Sunny Dubey
I now see that we desperately need meta-moderation.
for playback, i use ffdshow . It has post processing filters built into the codec. The Deblock filter is priceless for low bitrate movies.
Save the raw, uncompressed video, and have virtualdub do the compression. Its way more powerful in terms of what it can do.
If you don't know how to use virtualdub, check out this guide. It's a detailed guide on how to convert a dvd to avi, and it has one of the best intros to using virtualdub (i use it to teach newbies how to use virtualdub). Just select the xvid codec instead of divx.
D'oh, I forgot to preview.
Several resources:
1) You can go to doom9.net and check out the Guides section.
2) Go here: XviD FAQ and check out the section called "What do all the different options mean." Note that a lot of the provided links are outdated now, but that should give you an idea for a lot of the settings.
If you're into anime fansubs of things that aren't in the US yet, you'd quickly see how. Anime-Kraze is subbing Chrno Crusade and Inu Yasha now, for example. They use XVid. When a new ep is released of those two, it's usually downloaded a couple thousand times on Bit Torrent alone, then spread over P2P thereafter.
The codec proliferates quite nicely like that.
Divx and Xvid are two different implementations of the same standard. They are cross-compatibile.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
The same way you would with any other VFW video codec?
It's not particularly difficult, but I haven't used Premiere in ages so I can't really help you. Doom9 will give you good guidelines for configuring the codec properly, whether or not it is based on 'stolen' DVD content.
umm, yeah like that other poster said, you use it to encode from Premiere just like any other codec. i've encoded projects straight to Xvid from Premiere..
how does one get a +4 interesting for being a video editing noob?
That may be the official word, but try changing the AVI file's FOURCC code to that of DivX. It'll play, just without the extra enhancement filters and noise reduction found in many Xvid codecs.
DiVX ;-) was first "project mayo" (codename) - mayo because its difficult to make, and pretty much hit or miss - divx was first a hacked mpeg-4 codec (m$ .asp actually - really ment for streaming high quality video over broadband, hacked to work offline and "standalone"), and contained "hot" code. so divx 3.11, the version that really first took off, was illegal. the codec really exploded with the file sharing boom namely morpheus and kazaa. next release , they got rid of the stolen code, and all was good, the codec had even better quality and many of the audio syncing problems had been taken care of. by this point i had ~150 gb of video at ~300 hrs.
then, with the next release (5.x), and even more popularity, divx went commercial, and at first, i was upset, but they were pretty good about it, they had 3 versions, the one with no ads, but "play only", one with adware + encoding, and then the full $30USD one that let you do everything without ads. i thought, well these guys deserve some money for all the work that went into this great codec.
with version 5, divx and project mayo split (actually it was somewhere inbetween 4.x-5.x) and divx.com was born to handle distribution and all that other good commercail stuff, projectmayo.com went opensource, and became the sandbox for many projects based on divx (3vix, opendivx, etc) also, the Playa, the favored player of the project and built by the team continued to be developed here. .xvid was one of the spinoffs from projectmayo, and has become my favorite codec since i started using it. it seems to have the best "feel" to it, and is really really really good for animated films (to be fair, divx and the rest are really really good at animated films too, most codecs do, easy lines for the encoder to pick up and even out between frames). there are two main developers for xvid (its open so there are different builds) kopei, and nic. they both have their pros and cons, but you would be hard pressed to find them "in real life."
most of this info can be gathered from the mentioned sites, with a little digging. if im wrong about any of this, meh. its pretty right on, though. some great resources for these codecs are the forementioned www.doom9.org is really one of the best collections of encoding how-tos and other doodads. should be required reading for any video DIY noobs. another great resource is www.divx-digest.com you can get all kinds of codecs and players there, try em all, its the best way to learn (divx-digest is a sister site to www.digital-digest.com) like i said, i really dig xvid, and divx's commercial ventures are really starting to pan out (featured in a couple of computer games/video games (lord of the rings pc maybe?), hopefully soon will be built in to dvd players- think 2+ movies in hi-res on one dvd!). please please please dont use wmv. i cant play wmv, as many non M$ people cant, and they take more cpu to decode (looks pretty and is easy though).
before divx was known as divx, there was another company that released a project by the same name, where you would rent this cd/dvd disc thing and buy it to unlock it and watch it whenever you wanted, neat idea, poor execution, i only knew one persone that used it. they came in these little cardboard jewel cases. (before dvd players were all over, you had to get one that could play this divx )
batteries not included, bad grammar and spelling included. see side label for details
|plastic....or gasoline?|
DivX ;-) is both a reference to Circuit City DIVX as well as the Div3 and Div4 codecs it supports. So, your metasyntactic comment is on (whereas the root poster is just a dummy).
Matroska container with XViD video and Vorbis audio is the best free way to go today. You may find licensing problems with XViD, but you are likely find that with any modern video codec, although VP3 (I think) has beem released as Free and that might be worth considering as an alternative with absolutely no legal entanglements.
Also, for playback, if you are hosted on a Windows box, look at the FFDshow video filter and XViD decoder, its scaling functinality is excellent, much better than the hardware scalers built into consumer-grade video cards.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Free VC++ 7.1 compiler, C/C++ headers, C runtime library:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/
Free Win32 Platform SDK headers, libraries:
http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/s
Apple's codec sucks... 3ivx and XviD don't.
-- V
"and at 2kps-4kbs you are looking at some DAMN fine video" Wow, most people have trouble getting telephone quality audio through that. Is that one of those 'infinite compression' codecs?
oops. My bad. make that 2000kpbs-4000kbps. Thanks for catching that error.
"OGM" is a spin-off of Ogg from some time ago which hacks together Ogg (a great stream container format) and FourCC (the codec identity field from AVI) to easily add proprietary codecs (ie, DivX, XviD, other MPEG derivatives) to Ogg. Obviously, this is not endorsed by Xiph, the creators of Ogg and Vorbis, as they don't support patent-encumbered codecs.
Also, Ogg is not an acronym, so capitalizing every letter is incorrect. This is a common mistake. :-)
That is exactly correct. Except that there was no open divx4. There was Divx4 and then there was opendivx. The "only" fork of the defunct opendivx code was the birth of Xvid. Which shares little or no similarity to opendivx anymore. DXN bought the rights to sparky's encore2 code which was one of the last submissions to the opendivx cvs before it "broke". Further DXN also hired Sparky. Who's code did go into Divx4 but was not enough of a percentage of opendivx or Divx4 codebases to consider either one a fork of the other.
As far as I know there is no xvid quicktime component yet. Until one is written one you won't be able export a xvid movie from a quicktime based editor like iMovie. However you could export to some quicktime supported format and re-compress using a tool like ffmpegX.
Somebody search for BloodBR, and they are really hacked. I search for the e-mail and find that:
This That and that
And this shows that except English, the hack team also know another language: It. Anyway I hate hackers like that, oh sorry they are crackers.
But error again, because in DIVX 5 there isnt any code of opendivx 4 either.
(opendivx used a modified reference implementation, but then someone come with its own implementation, being much better, so divxnetwork abandoned the already running project and created a newone based on the new code)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
xvid is indeed meant to be DivX spelt backwards, a fact that is more noticeable if you actually use the shift key on your keyboard. xvid is normally represented as XviD.
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
(IANA Xvid developer. But I have worked with ffmpeg)
It's not just red. Codecs tend to also have problems with bright blue.
The reason: To improve compression, instead of storing color as RGB, they all use some form of YUV (i.e. "brightness", "redness", and "blueness".) Then, because the human eye is much more sensitive to brightness (Y) than color, they spend more bits on Y and leave the U and V channels at lower quality.
Usually, this is good. But if the picture has some areas that are very red or very blue, and don't have much brightness variation, you can see the imprecision in coding U and V.