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HandBrake Abandons DivX As an Output Format
An anonymous reader writes "DivX was the first digital video format to really win mainstream acceptance, doing for movies what MP3 did for music (both good and bad). Eventually even Sony, the king of proprietary formats, caved into pressure and added DivX support to its DVD players and the PlayStation 3. Now HandBrake's developers have made an interesting choice for version 0.9.4 — they ditched support for AVI files using DivX and XviD. Your only option now is to convert DVDs and other media to MKV or MP4 files, with the option to save as Apple-friendly M4V files. So why is HandBrake ditching AVI and XviD support when it's a format that's won such widespread acceptance? In the words of the developers, 'AVI is a rough beast. It is obsolete.'"
I may be off my base here, but I believe one of the big drawbacks from AVI (I didn't RTFA) is synching audio with video. You'll be watching a movie and suddenly it's dubbed worse than "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge." I am extremely impressed with AAC + h.264. Mp3 has left me very disappointed in movies so far. (probably the extreme dynamic range compression)
Basically, from the article:
The [Handbrake DivX] code has not been actively maintained since 2005. Keeping it in the library while implementing new features means a very convoluted data pipeline, full of conditionals that make the code more difficult to read and maintain, and make output harder to predict. As such, it is now gone. It is not coming back, and good riddance."
They go on to explain that DivX quality isn't as good either. I am not sure if that is true or not, but I think the major reason they are dropping it is because they didn't want to be bothered. Which is as valid a reason as any, I suppose.
Yeah, but the developers are kinda douchey as it is. For one thing, try downloading an older release -- they delete them all.
I can't get the latest to compile, on two different linux boxes (one Debian, one Ubuntu), so I've been using my older copy on the Debian machine. My binary won't run on the Ubuntu box, though so I needed an older version. I had to grab an svn snapshot of a previous release to get the older source code, and then their manky build system tries to download certain packages from a handbrake-run ftp in order to get specific versions of certain libraries, which fails to work since they've removed those files specific to the older version of handbrake. *sigh*
While googling for older releases I saw that other people have had persistent bugs in the last couple of releases which result in the devs basically giving a "works for me" response, leaving those wanting the older releases, too.
Their answer they give to anyone asking about an older version is "use the latest version, it has the most features." Which is a kinda jerky answer.
And did I mention their build system sucks? Sure, autotools is a bitch for a dev to set up, but at least it's never given me weird, inexplicable failures like jam and especially scons. (Damn you to hell, scons! I want those two afternoons back!)
In any case, handbrake started as an application for BeOS and didn't even have a windows gui until version 0.8.5. I was using it on macs way back in the day when 700 Mb was your practical limit because hard drive space was still more precious than blank CDs and writable DVDs were hugely expensive.
Why would they care about what windows does? It survived without windows before it was famous, it'll survive without divx -- h264 is so incredible you don't need divx anyway.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Personally I prefer the aptly named All To Avi. It is free, supports most of the popular formats, and most importantly for me outputs .Avi files that even my cheapskate family members with the el cheapo DVDs can play just beautifully. Also supports keeping the subtitles if you so desire.
As for handbrake? well considering the one format that just about every DVD players seems to support nowadays is DivX, that just gives me a really good reason to avoid and not recommend their software. Maybe in a couple of years when every player supports .Mkv, but that day isn't upon us yet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
VLC is a poor choice. Media Player Classic Home Cinema supports Windows's DirectShow media playback system, and supports hardware accelerated decoding, hardware accelerated rendering, codecs other than those included with MPC-HC, etc.
Most importantly, I think it's the only video player out there that supports vsync to avoid horrible 'tearing' while playing video.
I just can't imagine why anyone would think it's a good idea to play a video with vsync off, but every other player seems to do it.