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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."

9 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 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.

    2. 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

    3. 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: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
  5. 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."
  6. 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.