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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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More Info Here
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 )
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"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. :-)
(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.