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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.
does it matter if the codec isn't used commercially? Odds are that commercial publishers are not going to want any new format that doesn't have some kind of DRM, like it or not.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
My video compression blog
Just like DivX, except lacking in the GATOR software installation.
I'm still waiting for Doom3!
More Info Here
for mpeg-4 systems part of the spec to be implemented
overview
back in the day we didnt have no old school
Cool... I'm at this moment ripping "BladeRunner TDC". Transcoding with the xvid library is almost done. Quality is really very good versus some of the commercial applications out there for Windows. For example, the deep blue scenes in "Finding Nemo" tend to look blocky and sort of like a mosaic with a commercial Win2K program. Using DVDRip with xvid (on a Fedora Core 1 machine) the same scene is a lot smoother and the color gradients are not nearly as noticeable.
On a related note, I'll soon be trying out some of the pre/post filters for DVDRip. They do take a LONG time however. I've noticed that the Linux versions, when ripping at high quality, takes at least 20% longer than the Windows program at a similar bitrate. But the quality is better so I'm happy.
I just happen to be a software developer looking for new video codecs/encoding schemes and for me the sky is the limit. This will be a major commercial application in what ever form it finally takes place.
Maybe this should be an "Ask Slashdot" thing, but since many video folks are looking on this site, I might as well ask in this story.
(Without going into specifics of the project) I am starting with a totally clean sheet of paper here. What I need to do is be able to record several hours of video in a form that should be as lossless as possible (lossy formats are O.K., but it needs to have very good fidelity when the image size is restored). The video capture is going to happen in an embedded system, but playback will happen on a standard P.C. Playback is going to be a custom written application anyway, so it doesn't matter if it is currently supported by any common player.
Since I'm doing this as a clean sheet project, I'm also trying to use as many Open Source/Free Software tools as I can, although libraries in this case can only be LGPL (the main app will be totally propritary software, unless something else happens. This is still a possibility, so I am going to try and give back).
At the moment, due to some cheap hardware, we are implemented an MPEG-1 encoder for the system. This does a fair job, but I'd like to try and improve it.
I've thought about using PNG/MNG data files (MJPEG was also discussed), but the MNG spec isn't quite up to speed on A/V syncronization issues and the direction of the MNG group isn't quite where I like it to go. Still, I like the fairly good compression, lossless algorithms in the format and it is still an option.
MPEG-2 is an option I've looked at, mainly because I would be able to put it onto DVD players. Some plusses and minuses, but it really is more convience if this is the option we will use.
The Ogg formats are also something to look into, and they are more for full A/V quality compression. Certainly a candidate for me.
I'm not really all that familiar with MPEG-4, but it seems a huge jumble to me and means a lot of things to a lot of people, together with a bunch of misunderstanding fostered by equipment salesmen. (This is the coolest thing around, why don't you upgrade from that lousy MPEG-2 system to our new and improved MPEG-4 system!)
This system (XviD) does look interesting, and I like the open specifications of it particularly. Closed-specifications (where you have to pay $10,000 just to get a poorly written technical manual with NDA) are totally out of the question.
I guess I've looked around and would like to get some feedback as to what video encoding would you use on a totally clean sheet application if you had to encode video? Any takers?
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.
Anything that can make porn look cleaner yet dirtier looking at the same time is ok in my book... or er.. pants.
So how do I encode my old Cinepak-encoded animation work, which I have as an Adobe Premiere project, without encoding it twice with two different codecs, with all the attendant problems.
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.
This codec is much better than the xvid.org one. I experienced constant crashing with the 'official' codec whenever I opened an xvid-encoded file or even browsed a folder containing said file in File Explorer; however, with the koepi codec it has been plain sailing all the way, and great image quality to boot. Should a video codec have the ability to crash whatever program is using it?
Am I the only one who finds the lack of reliable and up-to-date codec info on the net very frustrating? It's always easy to find dozens of people with the same problem as you, virtually impossible to find anyone with an accurate answer.
Read Pynchon.
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.
Try reading the XVid FAQ
For those who do not want to click:
As if MS deviating from the standard would be shocking!If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Except for the fact that there is little to no code from Open DivX 4 in the XviD encoder any more. (But don't quote me on that, as it was written in some forum post on doom9.org, and I don't know where it has gone).
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
Divx and 3ivx both have nice integration into Quicktime making it available in all Quicktime based movie editing applications, does Xvid have the same? I would like to use a OSS solution
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Matroska is a A/V container (think AVI MOV ASF) that is aiming to be THE format to which all others will be compaired. HTTP and RTP streaming OK. Network glitch resistant. Totally Open. DVD style menuing and almost at version 1.0. I have been following the A/V open source projects for some time and these two (Martoska and XviD) are the biggest things since sliced bread. We finally have the tools to do online TV like we have had online radio for a few years now.
Be advised... XviD is brutal on the encode. a 720x480 29.970fps video 1 hour takes my celeron 1000 4-6 hours to compress with all the quality settings turned up. But the decode is not that bad in terms of CPU power and at 2kps-4kbs you are looking at some DAMN fine video. Even at 700kbps it is looking good. Best compressor on the planet (at least that I have messed with).
I assume you are familar with Ogg Vorbis which is compairable to AAC in terms of quality/bitrate. It makes a great companion to XviD inside a Matroska container
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 ;-) 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?|
This is what I see on the website...
XviD owned ?? oohhhh yeahhh BloodBR ownz XviD - sorry admin leak@hackermail.com
Guess we'll find out soon enough.
"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. :-)
I'm astonished at all the Xvid fanboyism around here. Sure it produces better quality than Divx, but at the same time, it's damn slow.
Why would you bother using an MPEG-4 codec if you don't care about quality?
Yes, XviD encodes fairly slowly. But you only have to do it once, whereas you enjoy the better quality of the job every time you watch it. They call this "asymmetric" encoding for a reason. Encode takes forever, decode doesn't.
If you only care about an encoding taking as little time as possible, hey, cool, not a problem. But if you care about quality results - Let it run overnight, and it makes little difference if it takes a half-hour or six hours.
I've done side-by-side comparisons with Xvid and Lavc using mplayer, quite recently. The two are very close, but I found Lavc was just a bit better.
I find that hard to believe. Without repeating your results, I have to suspect you've fallen for a "trick" Lavc uses, such as slightly boosting the gamma, or adding a blur-then-sharpen filter to give the illusion of clarity while actually removing quite a lot of detail.
Basically, with modern PC hardware and MPEG-4 codecs, "you get what you wait for". More CPU time, with some tolerance for various optimizations, generally means better quality.
Personally, I care only about the quality of the end product. I look forward to a functioning H.264 implementation, even if it means encoding 90 minutes of source material takes two full days.
(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.