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."

Comments

Nooo!

[XanC]

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

Re:Nooo!

[Idimmu Xul]

The Neap0litan XviD-Ogg-MKV Walkthrough is totally awesome and shows you in a step by step manner how to create an XviD/Ogg/MKV from a DVD complete with subtitles, it is beyond awesome.

Re:Nooo!

[|/|/|||]

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). :(

Decoding DivX

[paul248]

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.

Re:Decoding DivX

[Jherek Carnelian]

Are you kidding? All my attempts to use alpha version of ffdshow on windows have resulted in all kinds of weirdness

You just have to get a stable build. I use a build from october of 2004 or so (don't have it right in front of me) and it is significantly faster than either the divx or xvid decoders. It is rock-stable solid.

Plus the other ffdshow filters like scaling, noise removal, deblocking, logo-killer, etc can make a HUGE improvement in the final quality of the rendered image - especially for low-rez sources like most divx encodes. Might not make so much of a difference on a 17" monitor but on a 100" front projector the difference is night and day.

DirectX 6.0...

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?

Re:Compression

[keeleysam]

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.

DMF?

[cortana]

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)?

Re:DMF?

[Apotsy]

Quicktime is proprietary

Not really. The container format is pretty well documented, especially since it is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Sometimes you might encounter movies that use a Quicktime container but use a proprietary codec (like Sorenson), but that doesn't make the container itself proprietary.

ISO MPEG - is this even a container?

Yes, the MPEG-4 standard defines a container format, based on the Quicktime format (see above).

Tom's Hardware is slipping.

[Adam Zweimiller]

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

Re:Tom's Hardware is slipping.

[Vellmont]

Agreed. Toms Hardware is nothing but a big ad for the products it reviews. It was a good site years ago, but now it's just an advertising site with little integrity left.

I felt a disturbance in the force...

[Winckle]

As if a hundred MPAA executives cried out in pain and were suddenly silenced.

Gach! More amateur website baloney

[Jherek Carnelian]

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."

Possibly not an Information Theory major

[Tim Browse]

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. This implies a compression scheme that is just about as capable as the most aggressive Lempel-Ziv algorithms available.

Er...ok.

Mercifully free from the ravages of scientific method :-)

DivX 6 is Out...for Windows 2000/XP.

[Yaztromo]

Everyone else is currently left out in the cold.

We're hard at work on the DivX Create Bundle for Mac and the DivX Play Bundle for Mac. Rest assured that we'll let you know the second they are ready for release. In the meantime, please continue to use DivX 5.2.1 or DivX Pro(TM) 5.2.1 for Mac OS X.

(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.

Just tested a DivX 6 file on my DVP642

[kennedy]

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!

Re:Does anyone still actually prefer divx over xvi

[coolsva]

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)