Slashdot Mirror
DivX 6.0 is Out
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
One of the reasons I convert my movies is to get straight to the feature, and skip the gawd-awful menu crap...
http://download.divx.com/divx/DivXPlay.exe
ANyways, this has been out for not too long and it really is a great new release unlike many past versions.
Who needs to compress video anymore? Just put it on a new blue-ray disk in HighDef.
I hope this release addresses some of the problems plaguing previous versions. It is time to concentrate on a single codec that has interoperability options to it that allows for better tweaking to a media stream's needs so that we can forgo this silliness of multiple codecs and file formats.
I've always found ffdshow to be a much less crapware-like codec for watching DivX video. Not sure how it handles the new v6 stuff though.
Fuck. I just stared at the screen for five minutes thinking "DirectX 6.0? What the hell, it's not April Fool's day, why are we getting bad satire"?
Download sizes are big enough as it is... do we really need to be adding layers of menus? This would be more easily accomplished via a right-click listing of chapters and such...
One thing that TFA doesn't appear to go into is compatibilty with previous versions and third-party (ie ffmpeg) decoders. Anyone have information about that?
Ah the next revolution in porn is here!! :)
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
VLC is probably the best movie viewer for windows that I've ever seen, just because of the fact that it plays practically everything you can imagine without having to download random codecs here and there (most of the time anyway). Can DivX 6.0 do the same?
Start a happiness pandemic
Do we *really* need a new container format, or is this just a case of "not invented here" syndrome?
We already have AVI, Ogg, Matroska, Quicktime, ISO MPEG, Real and ASF. Why do we need Divx Media Format (DMF)?
Wow, i downloaded divx 6.0 this morning and didnt even realise its this fresh off the press.
After a quick play around with it, there didnt seem to be any noticable diffrence in encoded quality but the file size did drop a bit
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
The last linux version was 5.05 http://www.divx.com/divx/linux/
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.
I was immensly disappointed with the Tom's Hardware article. It was incredibly shallow and vague, a significant change for them. It was more marketing/press release than it was informative and objective review or introduction. If I wanted that I would read the information on divx.com. For those of you who want a mor technical and in-depth discussion, look no further than the Doom 9 Forums
mmm...muffins
If I recall correctly XviD is the OpenSource version of DivX. Im wondering how long untill they are fully compatible with DivX 6.
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.
As if a hundred MPAA executives cried out in pain and were suddenly silenced.
FFShow does a great job of DivX (And others) playback without having to install a multitude of codecs + crapware.
oh, wait, no, sorry, if I did that I'd be an insane t001.
better change that to: you call this a feature?
seriously, noone likes the menus, noone wants to see them, we just want to play the DVD and have you get the heck out of the way.
Now if you had a menu that disappeared after 10 seconds if you did nothing, that would be fine.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It WORKS... and it plays subs and multiple audio on the star wars revelations clip.. woot!
Yes, but now I'll be able to get subtitles for all those pirated Chinese-language movies that I've been watching on mute!
I prefer to watch movies about Chinese pirates in French myself, it's much more expressive and the translation is even more funny than the English one.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
No mention in the article and Google just turns up a few scattered, barely relevant comments. I've already been blown away by what H.264 can do at low bitrates--should I prepare to be blown away again? Anyone got a comparison, or is it too early to ask?
Wake me up when DivX can catch up with H.264.
This article is full of errors -- such as this "ZIP-compressed" Divx 5 video business (doing such a thing wouldn't really provide any benefit at all, nor is such a thing common practive like TFA claims), and its' claims that "MPEG codecs update only the most different elements of a frame at any time, and sometimes drop most or all of a frame when little or no change is detected" are only in a way accurate, and imply something that is totally untrue (that MPEG codecs drop frames to save space).
XviD is something like the forked version of DivX4 during the Mayonnaise? project before the DivX people went closed-source a few years ago.
Since then, they're pretty much entirely 2 different products.
The output format is a form of mpeg4 is should be already cross-compatible between the 2 except for new features requiring post-processing cpu support.
And now DivX has to compete against AVC (h264), the next generation codec, which is already available as part of Quicktime 7?, the opensource h264 encoder that's currently in development, and Nero Digital.
All of these are supposed to produce HD quality video in still small sizes, so you can put your Blu-Ray/HD-DVD video on a normal DVD. That's what I'm waiting for.
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!!!
Even Tom's...? Pretty funny considering SlashDot is linking to it.
Now, I know that there were some "hacks" to give you surround sound with DivX before, but this release's best new feature is the MP3 surround sound support (in my book).
With MP3 surround sound, we'll no longer be wasting space with AC3 files (at 120MB per hour!)- meaning that the days of the 2CD rips could be over!
Well, I guess I can't say that - I don't know how small the new format can do surround sound, but I'll sure be looking for it. And... we'll have to wait for hardware support, I'm sure...
I'm willing to bet that the new method of encoding files is far more friendly and less time consuming as well. Just a guess...
Huzzah! Go progress!
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
I think the days of vast quality improvement with each version of Divx are over. Maybe it's because the MPEG-4 standard is necessarily restrictive, but Divx hasn't made any significant quality advances since version 5 (and between 5 and 6 managed to take a couple of steps backwards before moving forwards again). At this point it's more about optimizations and marketable features, which is why the "menus" and the Divx Player are getting so much attention. The codec itself is, and has been, pretty static and will be for well into the future as long as it stays MPEG-4 compliant.
DivX do not bundle any spyware with their products, and if you want to qualify the optional Google toolbar as spyware that's your call. Also I was playing a lot with the DivX 6 beta before it goes out and it is better than XviD in the best encoding mode, DivX 6 in insane mode with optimized h263 quantizer consistently beat XviD with all the rate distortion on. I guess the scene as a more political reason to choose XviD over DivX, coz' from a technical point of view, DivX is better now !
It's fully available for Mac also, and can be played back with FFDshow which is open-source cross-platform.
mplayer supports it someway (probably using FFDshow) also.
So, it's just the wait for FFDshow to update to support any "new" features of 6.
As an earlier poster pointed out, it's nothing new.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
My DVP642 standalone DVD player handles most DivX-type video files, and has regular firmware updates. Does anyone know if this new menu format will be possible to support as a firmware update, or if it can only be supported in new hardware? Also, will it at least degrade gracefully and play like a normal avi, or will we need some kinda utility to rip out the data stream and put it in a package older players understand?
Since XviD is open source MPEG-4 codec (implying it's easier to get free tools to encode and decode)... what major advantages does the commercial divx have over xvid? They would reall have to blow away the competition in space savings to really make it worthwhile right?
The only thing keeping me from building a file server and ripping all my DVD's onto it so I can safely store them away somewhere is finding a way to save the complete disc rather than just the straight movie.
I don't have access to TFA since I'm at work, however if this is something that can be played back on *nix (I'm fine with ripping using Windows if need be) and handles multiple audio tracks, I'll have found the project I'll be spending the rest of the year working on.
I just use mplayer and run the sub files through babelfish a few times. English->German-French->English usually does the trick.
as long as it compresses 2 hours worth of the good porn to fit onto a CDROM, I'm good!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
I've been using Nero's encoder over DIVX recently for a variety of reasons. 1) It looks better and the files are smaller for comparable settings. 2) The mp4 files I burn with it run *perfectly* on my Mac and on my PC without needing extra software. 3) DIVX itself intentionally *BORKS* standard conforming Mp4. In fact people sometime synonmously use mp4 with DIVX - which bothers me immensely.
-_-
From what I can see, I like the H.264 codec better then divx codec. But with some of the new features this might bring it up to par. Does anybody have a preference? I think there both good. Just as long as nobody uses WMVs, I am happy
What scares me is that everyone is going to be using this new fancy codec right off the bat and it might not be compatible with my standalone player. Philips hasn't updated their DVP642 for quite some time and hopefully this won't break anything.
Not that I download pirated movies encoded by strangers or anything...
Get your Unix fortune now!
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."
It seems that they renamed Dr. DivX to DivX Converter. I've used Dr. DivX for a while and I liked it.
Actually Dr. DivX was a cute name, mostly because it was orginal and not cheesey... I can't wait to try this new software out.
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
Er...ok.
Mercifully free from the ravages of scientific method :-)
Because I bought this: http://www.techtastic.ca/reviews3/dvp642.html
and I'm not going to start encoding with DIVX 6.0 if I can't watch the movies my dvd player.
Does anyone know if I can upgrade firmware of the player or if the divx 6 codec is backwards compatible somehow (I know that wouldn't make any sense, but I'm reaching here...)?
Everyone else is currently left out in the cold.
(Ref: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/divx6.php).
No word on versions for any other platform either.
Personally, if I had my way more people would just use H.264, and then I wouldn't have to care.
Yaz.
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.
/. community is usually against.
Slashdot is the only forum where your unpopular and unfairly modded comments result in censorship, something the
*sigh*
While I think it is a *good step* to have Rich Media support interactive user interfaces, I think it's a *BAD STEP* to make that part of the compressed file format. Windows Media, Quicktime and Real all understand that and handle playlists, and user meta-controls outside of the content. This allows you to abstract the system and make controlable (programable) interfaces. Putting Menuing into the compression opens a can of worms that we just don't need to go down. This would be akin to putting Javascript functionality inside of JPEG images.
just my opinion, YMMV
-Adam
I've been using xvid for ages now and I'm very happy with the quality. Now, it's not like one blows away the other but with what happened with divx in the first place that gave birth to xvid was enough to get me curious about xvid in the first place.
Haven't read the article yet so maybe 6.0 is bringing something big to the table (besides menu's obviously), but I can't see me leaving xvid anytime soon.
From the Divx Hardware FAQ:
Will my DivX® Certified Player product become outdated quickly?
No, the DivX® Certified Program was created precisely to prevent our partners' products from becoming outdated quickly. We require forward compatibility for all DivX Certified products. Not only will the DivX Certified product not be outdated or obsolete quickly, but it will support formats that will be compatible with some really cool DivX enabled products coming in the near future.
Ha ha ha. You should try reading the Anandtech forums sometime. You read some truely silly stuff in there.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Nono, XVID it is then.
Circuit City surrenders.
DivX 5 was an MPEG-4 codec. As are XviD, 3ivx, ffmpeg's MPEG-4, QuickTime's MPEG-4, and lots of other codecs. They are all interoperable (if you don't enable extravagant mpeg features).
Divx 6 turns out to be just another proprietary video codec that nobody needs. I'm sure it will do better than h.264 since it doesn't comply to any spec. And they where able to look at lots of perfectly working "sample code".
It doesn't do all the manu crap, you can just play the main feature with no trailers, FBI warnings, adverts or anything. Now, on the rare occasion that I'm forced to use a normal DVD player, I hate it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Great, a week after buying a Philips DVD player that supports DivX 3,4 & 5 we are getting version 6.
Anybody in the know about those hardware devices out there that play one form or another of DivX?
Whee. Another locked-down, proprietary codec. Yeah, my pants are frickin' aglow with joy right now.
Me, I'm still hoping that Dirac turns out well. It's on v0.5.2 now; I haven't given it a shot, but I've heard good things. Also, y'know, it's unencumbered. Give me Dirac (or whatever shows up as a promising, free next-generation video codec) and Vorbis in a Matroska package any day.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Any suggestions of sites that have good reviews on this?
So, it sounds like this is both a new format and a new compressor.
Well, the immediate questions are:
* How good is the compressor? Say, relative to Xvid, for example? Is it still fully MPEG4 compatible?
* Is the DMF format open, closed, or even patented?
"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.
The guys who know their stuff tend to be busy earning money by using that knowledge. But you can try reading the forums at doom9.org. At least those guys know when to call a spade a spade.
No spyware?
I made the mistake of installing DivX once from their web site. Damn thing installed gator spyware that was a MAJOR hassle trying to get rid of even after removing DivX. Never will I support this crap compny again.
This was the only spyware that I ever had, and it was because DivX was so prevalent that I trusted them. Never again.
Spyware me once, then screw you forever.
DVD menus are absolutely horrible for handicapped users. They should be optional with a required logical declaration as to what titles on the disc are for what. Maybe some sort of XML document that declares the main feature, soundtracks, subtitle tracks, etc.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ok, so i downloaded the clip of that star wars fan film from the divx site, burned to a cd-r and tossed it into my philips DVP642 - it decoded the video with *no* issue, however it did skip past the menu that you will see on a windows system with the DivX Player.
no need to worry!
"DivX do not bundle any spyware with their products"
I call shenanegans on that.
Everybody knows that the DivX codec bundle puts gator on your system.
XviD does not inflict spyware so they will be my natural choice from here on out.
Face it. DivX.com's codecs reputation is mud these days.
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
Toms' Hardware and Anandtech are two of the best hardware review site's I have found. Their broader coverage reviews(game reviews, divx) may not be as thorough, but I'm curious which sites you would suggest over these two for unbiased hardware reviews and hardware industry news. Most every non-hobbiest hardware review site I have found rarely fails to praise the newest test board they have received. Not to mention pushing a strong buy reccomendation over 5% performance gains on parts twice as expensive as their 95% slower predecessors.
Does this mean OpenGL is now in?
then look at how the open source codec X264 has progressed in a very short period of time. Unlike DivX6 or XviD (both MPEG4 ASP), it is MPEG4 AVC. The latest build (build 263) features High profile (partial), RDO, Multi-threading Decoding is done via either ffdshow & Haali's Matroska Splitter or via mplayer. X264 is IMO absolutely brilliant and right on the heels of Nero AVC. Check it out! http://x264.nl/
I know when *I* use DVDshrink, it's because I want my output to be playable in a consumer DVD player (the one hooked up to my TV). I'm not sure how DVDshrink could output DivX and still be useable in a regular DVD deck (I'm aware of specialty DVD players that play back AVI, WMV, MOV, etc, but these players are not as common as your garden variety player).
Of course, maybe others out there use DVDshrink to output to media other than DVD-R, so I suppose DivX encoding would be useful to them.
Why do you expect us to believe your information over anyone else' then? YOUR comment should have a disclaimer saying "I'm just another chmoe with no real expertise and I'm prone to make stuff up if it sounds good." Somehow I'm inclined to trust the opinions and comments of an author on Anandtech more than those of a random poster on Slashdot.
That's what I'm getting when I try to encode anything in this codec...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Oh my... I had not read that part. The guy is clueless on video compression.
they stopped doing it months ago. the pro features just time out after six months.
While the rate of reviews is dissapointing, nothing I've found beats the quality of Ace's Hardware.
Tom's is crap, and has been for about six years now, and is steadily getting worse. Anand was better, but is slipping. Techreport is okay, as is Ars Technica. Avoid Tom's. Practically everyone there is incompetent.
The enemies of Democracy are
Thanks for the direct link. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the installation includes the "optional" Google Toolbar. It seems this optional component is mandatory.
Granted, worse things could be installed, but not everyone may want this. Somewhat hidden the installation of Googole Toolbar is.
I'm not sure what you're talking to, the file that I downloaded (MD5 = 1b3f17303ac11baad535e304c5ec758a *DivXPlay.exe) doesn't have the google toolbar as an optional componnent. It's not even listed there.
[... hold on
I just checked and the md5's are the same, and there's no google toolbar option. Try downloading the program again. I'm not sure where you downloaded it from exactly. Try the direct link I supplied.
AVI files are quite compressible because the audio and video portions are to be of a standard size, whereas, they are often not. Padding is used which can be removed by compression. Typical overhead of using a VBR audio/video in this container is the order of 5% or so. QuickTime is much better than AVI in this respect
FYI, what the parent says is the history of Divx. An open source project called OpenDivx was started to extend/enhance the 'illegal DivX:)'. Once it reached a critical mass and a good code base, DivxNetworks apparently decided to allegedly take up the code base and convert it to a closed source Divx codec. In theory, OpenDivx was left to continue beyond version 4.0Alpha, but it never did. People rather started a GPL version and called it XVID
As of now, Divx vx Xvid is like BSD vs Linux. Both are equally good, neck in neck. Only difference is, Xvid cannot, by law, distributed as executable. MPEG4 is patented and Xvid is only distributed as source (except by good folks like Nic & Koepi)
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/05/10/q t7.html?page=2
Better compression. Takes longer to compress though..
Quicktime 7 has h.264, and the next gen dvd players will use it..
When attaching a vbr mp3 file to an avi that there is almost 3 times as much overhead required to do so than with a cbr audio stream.I Mux%20GUI/en_estimate_overhead.html
Look here http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~noe/Video-Zeug/AV
In describing a "limitation" of Quicktime, Apple has this to say:
"Because of the nature of spacetime, chapter lists do not work with live streaming movies."
At the very least, note that the guys're adding DRM. Bad Thing (or is it?).
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
12345
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Probably more accurate to compare it as BSD versus SunOS pre-AT&T lawsuit at the time of the split. It's more like BSD v Linux now.
XviD doesn't pay fees to the mp4 people so it's not legal as an executable.
However, today DivX players are cheap and widespread. Therefore, a DivX-4 file, even having less features than DivX-6, is significantly more usable to me as I can see it on TV. So, it will be an uphill battle: there won't be lots of DivX6 files until players support them, and there won't be lots of such players until the files are ubiquitous.
Hope I'm wrong.
P.S. Anybody notice the analogies to IPv4 vs. IPv6? :)
Divx 6.0 released but only for windows 2k /xp but not for win98 / me or any older versions. Divx left old pc users like mac and linux users. :(
They already do. ALL DivX ceritifed players play DivX 6 video and subtitles and multiple audio tracks. So the same cheap DivX players play these files too.
Ok, I get your point that regular AVI files, compressed with the 6 codec, could still be playable. But I'm pretty sure that DMF files will be useless in it - and that's one of the major points of the new format, isn't it?
Don't you know that DivX support terrorists?
While the rate of reviews is dissapointing, nothing I've found beats the quality of Ace's Hardware.
Tom's is crap, and has been for about six years now, and is steadily getting worse. Anand was better, but is slipping. Techreport is okay, as is Ars Technica. Avoid Tom's. Practically everyone there is incompetent.
Just wanted to throw in a "me too!" to your comment. Tom's used to have semi useful info a long time ago & ever since Anand had the redesign of the site it's gone to shit. I also like HardOCP simply b/c Kyle & the rest of his crew don't simply report the hype, they investigate it and tell you what the new whizbang 993742 FXT Ultra actually does in real-world terms.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
At least not in his traditional review/preview sense. It was simply a news item story - strictly right column stuff. It was a press release - like all the press releases they put there. It was the submitter's fault for making it sound like it was some sort of Tom-style throwdown.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Think about it:
DivX (pr. "div-ex") It rolls off the tongue.
Mp3 (pr. "em-pee three") Same deal. That, among other reasons, is why everybody either uses that codec or uses the word to decribe any digital music file.
I'm sure ffdshow, which I've never heard of, has technical merit, but the name will prevent it from ever being widely adopted.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
There is a significant lack of meat in the Tom's Hardware article, and lots of cream puff. Tom's Hardware continues to get their video articles wrong year after year, and this article continues the trend by having the report compare DivX5 to DivX6 as like zipping up a D5 .AVI and having it be the same size as D6. That is incorrect on so many levels that you can't take the rest of the article seriously. Even the interview with "Gej" is vague and not even close to having any technical meat in it.
Another press release turned into "news"...
i dont really care IF they did stop bundling gator. divx 5 loaded my system with that shite and since then ive steered clear of them. ill take xvid over divx anyday, divx 5 support, open source, and nothing bundled.
Why do you expect us to believe your information over anyone else' then?
Well, there's the small matter of him being correct, but apart from that? Nothing. Toms/Anandtech are places I'd trust when it comes down to the latest stepping of AMD64 or some such thing, but when they branch out of their core expertise they often come away looking rather daft.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
almost doubly slower..
with post processing enabled (including ati hw post processing). compared to the last beta divx fusion.
the only reason i ever download and use divx player is for the hw PP'ing. now if some smart fool were to enable system wide directshow (or even enabled in mplayer/ffdshow/vlc/etc) , then i can dump this garbage.
it's been almost 5 years since the r300 generation of dx9 cards... and only in the last month have we seen dxva (direct x video acceleration) support for wmv9 HD... if these aren't difficult to program, why the hell has it taken this many years to get something that was promised way back in 2001?
recently ati has also promised h264 decoding... who knows if it's a next gen-only feature... it's not like the current crop of cards have even been remotely tapped in regards to their potential to decoding video.
ati and nvidia both suck badly in regards to overpromising and false advertising.
someone set us up the class action lawsuit.
since they cannot hear the throngs of people complaining, maybe their wallets will. yes, make lawyers richer and make unethical companies poorer. and no, giving 1 dollar off coupons on new products, is NOT a penalty or suitable punishment.
proprietary sw/hw suck roosters. eventually i will migrate away from it, as well the rest of the poor souls who are in situations like myself.
yes virginia, DRM and open standards are mutually exclusive.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
To xvid, WMV, and nero digital? Is nero digital any good? I have it, but I've never used it.
From the Doom 9 Forum post:
:D
Hidden feature: Hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift and press 'A' during playback to enable old-school ASCII rendering of your favorite movies!
I'm hurridly downloading the divx sample from the website to try this... how very cool. (Useless, but very cool)
The last I heard DivX was bundling their products with Gator/Claria crap in it. It that still the case?
The commercial realities is that no format without DRM is going to get industry support these days. DRM is the 2005 equivalent of "push media", a buzzword which guarantees investment; enough people in the industry have bought Big Copyright's vision of a new golden age of profit where all rights can be monetised and licenced down to the finest grain that not putting in some steps towards this DRM-topia is commercial suicide.
Look at CPU design, for example. Intel has onerous DRM in their CPUs, and the Cell processor is even worse. And anyone developing anything else for any applications involving the handling of "content" faces a choice: either (a) put in DRM mechanisms or (b) lose market share to competitors who have in the event of (i) new copyright laws/FCC mandates or (ii) the MPAA's lawyers putting the frighteners on hardware makers.
..for all those with a hardware chip which plays back 'ordinary' (divx5) back.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Because locking things up requires manpower. Stores would rather not pay for it if they can avoid it. In all marketing and retail decisions, "additional packaging" as a solution seems to trump just about everything else.
Actually locking up the product would deter theft more than extra packaging. Yeah, extra packaging will make stuffing the card in your pocket require more time/work, but with many many retail chains skimping on the manpower (as you pointed out) finding a quiet corner to slice your way to the memory card is easier than you'd think.
Are you forgetting that Retail Shelf Space costs money too?
There really is no reason for a consumer to handle memory cards to start with, a card looks like another, and looking at them will rarely give you any clue to the quality, much like inkject cartridges (I notice they are quite expensive and don't come in boxes eight inches large on each side). I also notice many retailers don't put them out, instead substituting a tear-off pad with the cartridge bar code for the customer to take to the check out.
Remember when laundry detergent came in those suitcase-sized boxes? Remember the great "innovation" of concentrated detergent which is now the norm? All they did was simply not put in so much filler.
Uh, that had nothing to with stealability, which I was talking about, it was pure marketing ploy. It gave the impression the customer was buying more product for their money, when in fact they ran out just as quickly since they used more per load.
When was the last time you opened a box of food, say a Rice-a-roni type product only to see the box is almost half empty. With the case of "yellow rice", which my family loves, I found you can buy the boxes, but for much cheaper you can buy the little foil packets that contain the same amount of product. Isn't that amazing?
1) The product settles in shipping, and unfortunatly a rigid box can't squish and change to reflect that.
2) Boxes are easier to stock on store shelves with their fronts facing out. Doing that with bags would require peg hooks.
3) Boxes are more visible on store shelves, which influences sales. There's a reason General Mills puts their cereals into boxes and Malt-O-Meal doesn't.
The rest of your post is a rant.
Enjoy spending $1.00 for 3oz of CheezIt in a small factory sealed bag when I just bought a 16oz box for $2.00, and it stays plenty fresh during the weeks I eat it (devided into small sandwich bags I take to work).
Memory cards are just another consumer electronics item being packaged in a bulky, flashy blister-pack when a small box would do nicely.
Simply because none of the format you described is adpated for hardware decoders and DVD players.
Most of those format are too generic to be supported completely. So you need to do what DVD did define a format that is adapted to your needs : they took the ISO MPEG Program Stream format and build upon it, imposed some sane restrictions to allow things like fast forward and so on.
Hopefully DivX did something similar with MP4 or AVI.
Wow! The DivX guys invented the deblocking filter. There's probably only been 50 other video programs that have implimented this before Divx got around to it.
They wouldn't have wanted to actually improve the MPEG-4 codec, or upgrade to a better one (H.264/Wavelet), they just want to mask the defects in their current codec, so it's still lower quality than anyone else, but the blockiness isn't so obvious.
And they invented MENUS. What a shock. Other formats (such as Matroska) have only had this functionality for a good 6 months now...
This is no-doubt going to end-up like SVCD menus, and the like. Sure, you CAN make them now, but it's so incredibly complicated that NOBODY will ever bother (unless they are getting paid to make a demonstration by Divx Networks). The Flash-based DVD menus are just too complicated to automatically convert, and most people HATE THEM WITH A PASSION anyhow.
Yes, you should always go for a cutting-edge audio codec like MP3, not one of those crappy ones, like AC3, AAC, DTS, Vorbis, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Perhaps switching to XviD would be a good idea..
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Actually it is legal to distribute an MPEG-4 encoder executable as long as it is for "educational use".
Worst. Signature. Ever.
OpenDivx/Project Mayo was NOT an extension/enhancement of DivX :-), it was written from scratch. If is wasn't, I think Microsoft might just be breathing down DXN's neck rather heavilly right now.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
I read on the Divx site that they did indeed have Gain/Gator in the 5.1 release, but they no longer do. Still I avoid them as long as there is alternative.
Any company that foists this stuff on its users, is not to be trusted with clear thinking.
Gain/Gator was a supremely offensive piece of spyware, how this escaped the Divx folks is beyond me. They currently claim that Gain was just painted with the spyware brush, but really wasn't that bad.
Ahem. It got me and I would rate it as scumbag level evil.