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DivX CEO on Hackers, YouTube, Technology
Cintia Barreto writes to mention a Red Herring interview with Jordan Greenhall The CEO of DivX talks about the company's roots, a little bit about YouTube, and how entertainment technology grew out of the file-sharing days of the late 90s. From the article: "We sat down and said what you just created will do these things, people will adopt it, they will use it to transmit high-quality video, probably movies, probably television shows, probably porn--on the Internet--and in this domain and in this particular way. In some timeframe, they will want to be able transmit that from the PC into the living room. It will be the kind of content that wants to live in the living room--just like what happened with MP3. You had music files sitting in your PC and you wanted to take them portable. Somebody had to invent the portable MP3 player. In fact, I was at MP3.com at the time, I got to physically touch the first MP3 player ever made. It was made by these guys from Korea--it was literally duct tape."
True story. Early mp3-capable DAPs were made completely from duct-tape-based transistors. A single roll of duct tape can be used to make hundreds of thousands of mp3 players. Literally.
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In Korea, only old people make MP3 players out of duct tape...
"And it's made of a bunch of different tools."
"When you've invented an algorithm that does compare this frame to this frame and see if there's any difference between them, it's done."
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Why not tell us more about battery life, cpu usage, file size, quality, encoder software, costs and your DivX certified?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That's a funny way of saying "So he took MS's MPEG4v3 and disabled the check that prevented it from working inside AVI files".
And BTW it was not the "first" DivX either...
I always had this vague feeling that whoever ran DivX was an asshole, and now I feel vindicated. I spent too many years just wanting the codec, and only being allowed to download it with a bunch of crappy software.
The "MP3 player made from duct tape" was presumably an early version of the Eiger MPMan. I own a Compaq/Hango PJB-100 (first hard disk based MP3 player, i.e. the ur-iPod) which still works fine (now playing Prokofiev's second piano concerto). Ironically, it actually is held together with duct tape now.
I think you are the only one. I don't think anyone has thought about Circuit City Divx in years. At the time, I just remember DivX avi or DivX ;)
Circuit City Divx has been well forgotten.
What isn't forgotten is the first DVD movie I encoded to Divx avi took 10 hours on a PIII - it was Black Mask (Jet Li) and I still have it in a spindle somewhere...
gotta love the history of codec technology
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I think he meant the first portable device with the singular purpose of holding and playing music files in the mp3 format. At least thats what I think when I hear the phrase "first mp3 player". Granted, the statement wasn't qualified but I don't believe his meaning was too obscure.
What if someone used their notebook PC for that one purpose?
Anyway, the device he saw was clearly hacked together. There's millions of people hacking together projects at home. Ever hear of the ambient orb? Before I did, I'd embedded an RGB LED in my USB keyboard that sets its colour based on web events.
The first MP3 player ever made was probbably made using Soundedit 16 and Director Shockwave as .SWA files were MP3 with extra header information.
The first licensee of MP3 from Fraunhofer was Macromedia and they called it SWA. This was around mid 1995 IIRC.
I'm sure Buzz Kettles from Macromedia and Murat Konar were the first people to create MP3 playback and they did it through Shockwave.
The first multi song MP3 player was written in Director 5 in late 1995 and it allowed the user to select any song from a certain CD, The Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust. It was demoed by Phil Shiller who at that time worked on the Director time at Macromedia. Back then, it was compressed at a bit rate of 96 kbps so that it would fit on a 100 MB drive which at time cost around 200 dollars.
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Then there were portable MP3 players and DV recorders and cell phone videos followed by easy to use distribution services for people to share them through, and so it was.
My prediction? This stuff was just giving us a glimpse of what is to eventually come. There is a technology that is completely linked up with these others through the distribution channel it will inevitably find itself on. Desktop fabrication. I'm talking 3D printers with downloadable blueprints that people share through P2P networks. You think the RIAA and MPAA are bad? Just wait till car manufacturers and insurance comopanies figure out that there are people driving "pirated" custom printed AMG55's that aren't made by Mercedes. I realize there's already a pirated car market in the East, but it is NOTHING like what we will eventually have. We're going to seriously reconsider how we view products, raw materials, IP, liability, etc. This is only the beginning.
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You know, encoding a 45 minute TV episode to double pass Xvid takes about 4-5 hours on a 2.4GHz P4 (~350MB).
But I can say that quality has gotten better from the DivX 3.11 days to modern codecs.
The troll with karma.
Divx 3.11 Alpha: Used for a long time, just a hacked version of MSMPEG4 codec.
;)
Divx 4: Opendivx, a new Simple Profile mpeg 4 encoder
Divx 5: Closed Source, ASP codec, the closing of the source led to the XviD project
Divx 6: Some improvements to Divx 5, and a new container format (like AVI or MKV).
There have been rumors about Divx making an AVC (h264) codec.
However, currently, Divx is FAR surpassed in encoding quality and speed by XviD. Also, XviD streams are COMPLETELY compatable with DivX players/streams, as they are both simply mpeg-4 ASP.
However, the x264 encoder blows them both out of the water, but it is slow as hell
Funny how Porn makes or breaks much new video technology. IIRC(can't verify...), a major reason VHS won over Betamax was because of pornography and its embrace. Interesting that he is acknowledging it as a major driving factor in video technology. Especially because of its stigmatization.
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Am I the only one that automatically wonders why people are still using DivX when Xvid has been shown to be much better? But then, I wonder the same thing about MP3.
I seem to remember something about DivX networks originally running an open-source project to collect people's ideas, then closing it down and going closed-source. Were any Slashdotters involved in the open-source project and the subsequent dispute?
No, your not the only one. I suspect a lot of the people are too young and perhaps not in a Circuit City locale to remember the (failed) abomination. I still remember quite well...
Regards, Steve
Your logic fails in one key area. Creating real physical things costs a lot of money and you have to use a lot of raw materials and energy. No machine will ever exist which lets an individual make something on his desk like a cell phone. Even on a bigger scale, say 100s of units from a small undeground company is near impossible. The market competition is far too fierce to allow them viable profits.
Even my computer with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB of memory was still having problems with H.264/AVC video. Perhaps that was just due to earlier decoders, and maybe the situation is better now that AVC is starting to gain popularity, but it'll still probably be a while before the majority of computers can decently handle it. After all, quite a respectable percentage of people have computers that don't even handle MPEG-4 part 2 aka ASP aka DivX/Xvid too well. The progress of x264 is quite exciting though.