Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DivX 6.0 is Out

Posted by timothy on from the now-about-the-content dept.

mattspammail writes "DivX 6.0 is out. Even Tom's Hardware has an article on it. According to TFA, this should be a big step up in compression and features. DVD-style menus are now an option."

16 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. Nooo! by XanC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One of the reasons I convert my movies is to get straight to the feature, and skip the gawd-awful menu crap...

    1. Re:Nooo! by ProfaneBaby · · Score: 2, Insightful

      To make a LOT of money, DivX needs to start moving in the direction of a 'real' corporate video provider - DVD menus, subtitles are good, DRM will get more attention.

      DRM is good, and it's bad (OK, mostly bad), but given its roots, DivX should be able to do DRM without pissing off the millions of existing users.

      DivX encoded DRM'ed video for websites would be very, very nice from a provider's point of view.

      --
      Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
    2. Re:Nooo! by XanC · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Suppose I download an episode of a TV show I missed, or a DVD rip of a disc that I broke.

      ...And it has these menus. Ugh.

    3. Re:Nooo! by pegr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Of course its still possible to break all DRM.

      That is precisely correct. The typical encryption scenerio is described as Sender (A), Receiver (B), and Attacker (C). The trick is how to keep the secrets from C. With DRM, B and C are the same person...

      Game Over

    4. Re:Nooo! by |/|/||| · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Exactly. That's why the only practical way to implement DRM is to make Receiver (B) a different entity from Attacker (C). Right now they are the same person, but if we're not careful then pretty soon (B) will be DRM hardware. You will end up being the "attacker" (C) trying to get at your own data.

      The only solution? Don't buy it. Of course, if everybody else buys it then you're screwed. Judging from my observations of the behavior of my fellow Americans, you're going to be screwed (probably regardless of what country you live in). :(

      --
      [javac] 100 errors
  2. Re:Compression by keeleysam · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Divx is used for transfrerring over the internet, so the smaller the file is, the better.

    Even with many pipes over 500KB/second, it still is not enough to stream in 1080i.

    --
    Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
  3. Re:Compression by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Who needs to compress video anymore? Just put it on a new blue-ray disk in HighDef.

    Is this before -- or after -- you've shipped it across the Internet?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  4. Re:Compression by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Yeah, cause with BlueRay they won't use MPEG2/4 or H.264 or something like that. Lets just use that raw video feed...

    So that is 1920x1280x32 (1080p) per frame...say 30 frames per second...hurm...I only see that as around 230GB for your two hour movie...that will fit just GREAT on a 45GB BlueRay disc.

    Oh...wait...we need to compress that?

  5. MP4 by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It is time to concentrate on a single codec that has interoperability options

    I agree; that's why the industry should standardize on the multi-vendor, open MP4 standard.

  6. Yessss! by crow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I often copy borrowed DVDs to my hard drive to watch and delete later, but space is limited. I like to keep all the special features until I'm done, so I just do a raw copy now, but this will give me an option to keep all the menus and features, without consuming nearly as much disk space.

  7. Re:XviD by glwtta · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I'm not sure how much it is a "version" of divx, rather than an open source implementation of MPEG4.

    The answer to your question - very long (as in "never"). Xvid and DivX (as well as the other MPEG4s) are not "fully compatible", in theory they should play each other's datastreams, but each has features that the other doesn't understand.

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi
  8. Again with the negative FUCKING Mods. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    I'd post this with my ID, but I've hit my limit for negative moderations this week.

    This guy was trying to give us more information. He wasn't "Whoring" or anything (I would flame him for being a "Whore" myself). WTF?!? /.!! I've been M'Moderating moer and more "Unfair" these days!!!

  9. Re:I LIVE for the Menus on DVDs by iamlucky13 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Now if you had a menu that disappeared after 10 seconds if you did nothing, that would be fine.
    ...with no sound. Replaying the same 10 seconds sound clip over and over again while you go make a sandwich drives me crazy.

    Actually, I'd prefer they simply not come up at all, but still be on the disc. That way you can hit the menu button on your remote and go to whatever chapter you were on or find the special features (which are seldom worth watching, except on some Pixar films).
  10. Gach! More amateur website baloney by Jherek+Carnelian · · Score: 5, Insightful
    How can anyone take the Tom's Hardware article when he starts out with rubbish like this:
    Historically, DivX 5 format videos were best shared over the Internet by first wrapping them in ZIP files for better compression. In my tests with the new DivX Encoder--a tool scheduled to replace the company's Dr. DivX--I could re-encode DivX 5 files as DivX 6, with the resulting file size not much larger than the ZIP-compressed DivX 5 file.
    If he's getting more than a percent or so additional compression by zipping up the divx encoded file, he's doing something wrong during the divx encode to begin with - and what little amount he might get it is going to de due to compressability of the container format, not the encoded video.
    This implies a compression scheme that is just about as capable as the most aggressive Lempel-Ziv algorithms available.

    LZ is a lossless alogorithm and no matter how "aggressive" LZ is, it can't come anywhere near the compression ratio of a properly configured divx encoding because the divx encoding is lossy - it throws out data.

    If LZ somehow were "just about as capable" then everyone would be using LZ in the first place and all these preceptual lossy compressors would have died off long ago.

    Heck, I can write a "compressor" that produces a file of the exact same size as the original and that LZ will make bigger rather than smaller. All you have to do is make the encoding random enough (like something along the lines of xoring it with pi).

    So many of these "hobbiest" websites like Anandtech and Tom's are just the blind leading the blind with gross misrepresentations that end up being taken as gospel by those who don't know any better.

    There ought to be a disclaimer before each "article" on sites like those with a warning that - "author is just another schmoe with no real expertise and is prone to make stuff up if it sounds good."
  11. Thanks for the defense... by zoloto · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I didn't realize people modded this kind of useful information down simply because their perceptions of karma whoring are slightly off. I've hit a karma cap and really never have cared for it in the first place.

    Slashdot is the only forum where your unpopular and unfairly modded comments result in censorship, something the /. community is usually against.

    *sigh*

  12. he COULD be right... by katharsis83 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "LZ is a lossless alogorithm and no matter how "aggressive" LZ is, it can't come anywhere near the compression ratio of a properly configured divx encoding because the divx encoding is lossy - it throws out data."

    It's possible that even after divx is done encoding a file, there's still a certain amount of "order" left. Divx encodes using perceptual quality as it's perogative; it's not a source-coder, which is the reason it performs so much better on video files. However, it IS possible that LZ77/whatever year, is able to squeeze a little bit more size out of it, since LZ is a general source coder.

    I don't think Tom is saying that LZ is as capable as divx at compressing video files, he's just saying there's enough "order" left over in the file after divx to make a 1% difference after using LZ, which is entirely possible. Almost ANY given bit-sequency that's not entirely random will have a 1-2% compression margin if you use LZ on it, depending on your window size, etc. On a 700 MB file, it's not inconceivable that more than a few long-sequence matches will occur.