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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."

8 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...

  2. DirectX 6.0... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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"?

  3. DMF? by cortana · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)?

    1. Re:DMF? by Apotsy · · Score: 5, Informative
      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).

      --
      Free Hans!
  4. Tom's Hardware is slipping. by Adam+Zweimiller · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. I felt a disturbance in the force... by Winckle · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  6. 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."
  7. Just tested a DivX 6 file on my DVP642 by kennedy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!