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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."
In Korea, only old people make MP3 players out of duct tape...
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.
Re: Apple and "Random", apparently "Random" is his way of saying, "we have no chance whatsoever, but I want to pretend like it could happen at any moment". Yes, of course, technically Apple could use DivX, but they've already chosen the video format they want to use, and integrated it into their OS and iPod. Even if DivX offered improvements to power-consumption, it would already take quite a bit for Apple to back away from h264 and encode the iTMS in some other format. Maybe... maybe if DivX was vastly superior in some way, then I could imagine it. But it isn't.
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.
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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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
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.