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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 It is obsolete.'"
Dropping all formats that Windows play by default is IMO a bad decision. It may make the CCCP Project more popular and spur more people to install Quicktime (yuck), but it'll also drive away lots of inexperienced users.
Streaming to my legacy device which cannot be easily reprogrammed such as my Xbox 360 really relies on XVid. So, for now, I guess Handbrake is the rough beast. Oh well, I use dvd::rip anyway and avidemux when I need to do some transcoding. Computers can be easily upgraded, devices not so much: that is something to keep in mind too.
Shh.
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.
Qxe4
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)
All we need now is for .flv to dry up and blow away...
I was surprised when this happened, but I can appreciate that, ultimately, it's a legacy format. Apparently, the AVI implementation is very convoluted to keep up with new features. Here's a selected quote from their release blog: "It does not support modern container features like chapters, muxed-in subtitles, variable framerate video, or out of order frame display....The 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." (sadly there didnt seem to be a permalink to the whole article - here's the current news page).
As such, I've moved on and figured out which flavor of mpeg-4 works best for me; and I'm happier with the improved picture quality as a result.
While technically true, that's functionally meaningless. If your program supports limited codecs that work with a particular container (for example... AVI) ditching one is the same as ditching the other.
For all intents and purposes DIVX is AVI as far as popular support goes. I'm not sure I can name another codec that I've seen used in the last few years as more than a intermediate step.
I don't mind the actual .flv format as much as watching the videos with the crashy, memory-hungry CPU hog that is Flash. Playing back flv containers in VLC is perfectly fine. The video is mostly H.264 anyway.
Because H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is Mature! We have availability of fast and reliable open source x264 H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder and the wide spread usage of Matroska (MKV) container files and MPEG 4 (MP4) container files. Even some set-top boxes support playback of video and audio from both containers now and more are announced for this year. There is also a demand now for HD content in both 720p an and 1080i/p formats H.264 is required to give reasonable file sizes versus XviD/DivX (MPEG-4 ASP).
Also Audio Video Interleave (AVI) container files are problematic and have limitations since they don't allow the inclusion of chapters or subtitles, are not compatible with newer audio encoding formats such as AAC and lossless Dolby Digital or DTS audio formats, and don't work really well with some of the newer video formats.
It is time to move on from this old container format and also move away from older DivX and XviD (MPEG-4 ASP) formats onto the newer H.264 / MPEG-4 (x264) video encoding formats.
It's hardly a de-facto standard; it's just another utility using ffmpeg and x264.
Eventually even Sony, the king of proprietary formats, caved into pressure and added DivX support to its DVD players and the PlayStation 3.
DivX is a proprietary format. The summary seems to be implying that somehow it is not. Sony licensed DivX from the company that created it, it didn't use some "open" implementation.
... and then they built the supercollider.
No, handbrake is a front end for the de-facto standard for creating multimedia files... get to know them and you won't care which flavor of the month format is being used. Personally I stopped using handbrake years ago because the developers always seem to be dropping X for some lame reason.
It's depressing to see x264 become so ubiquitous as it seems very fractured. I have devices that will play some videos, but not all.
Bitch all you want about Divx, but if I want something that will stream to my Xbox without fail, play on my DVD player... Divx/Xvid is the only option.
Perhaps you need to stop using a 7 year old OS as your reference of what "Windows does".
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I don't want to take the air out of your argument... but... your Xbox 360 never had the ability to play divx/xvid videos until Microsoft released an update. They can release another to accept mpeg4 - but they won't. That's a great feature for the next Microsoft gaming console.
DivX/Xvid are encoders for MPEG-4 Part 2, aka Advanced Simple Profile. H.264 is MPEG-4 Part 10. I would imagine that H.264 has both a CPU cost and a royalty cost higher than ASP. I seem to remember the Xbox 360's add-on HD DVD drive coming with an H.264 decoder, but I also seem to remember its license being limited to HD DVD playback, not Ethernet or USB hard drive playback.
But perhaps more importantly, the Xbox 360 isn't the only device that would need an upgrade; DVD players carrying the DivX logo come with decoders for a subset of MPEG-4 Part 2 but not necessarily H.264.
This is something I honestly don't understand: If VLC can play flv with 1% CPU usage, why can't we have a VLC plugin for a browser that'll do that on Youtube?
First of all the original handbrake.fr article says nothing specifically about DivX. It talks about XviD and OGM. I guess OGM wasn't "controversial" enough for the editors so they ignored that and focused on DivX.
But the real issue is: Big deal, DivX themselves are moving to H.264/mkv with all deliberate speed. Even they realize there's no point in anyone holding on to codecs and containers which are inferior in every respect. So, since mkv is a legitimate container in DivX7, the writeup is in fact erroneous. Surprise.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
You could just use "greasemonky" plugin in Firefox and install the "YouTube Without Flash" script and videos will play using your default media player...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
When you visit Youtube, I believe that it tells the browser to load an .swf file, which is a Flash file and not a video file. This swf file is actually a video player (including the controls and everything) which has been written in Flash, and that player plays whatever video file it has been instructed to play.
Even if VLC could load that swf file correctly, it would then be running the YouTube Flash application which would in turn play the movie, and that's not what you want. You want direct access to the FLV file.
FLV itself isn't a terrible format, though. I think it's basically just h263, which... yeah, just like you'd think, was a precursor to h264. Youtube is encoding everything in h264 these days anyway, and Flash plays h264 files. In all cases, the problem isn't the video file encoding, but the Flash player that's used to play it.
I just renamed all my AVI files to MKV. It's, like, the same thing, right?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
This is not informative.
XviD is an MPEG-4 Part 2 implementation; it is one of many.
x264 is not a standard at all; it is an encoder for the H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 standard, which is just as open as MPEG-4 Part 2.
This is a necessity; H.264 is suitable for encoding low-bitrate, low-resolution video or high-bitrate, high-resolution video. It is useful for 20 mbit/sec high definition streams, or 256 kbit/sec videoconferencing.
The standard defines various levels that various hardware decoders implement.
Possibly because they were out-of-spec, or not in a container the player supports. x264 isn't responsible for the user's ignorance.
The dvix people added muxed in subtitles, chapters a long time ago, these people just can't be bothered.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That's as bad as the time when I downloaded an album in wma...
Circumcision is child abuse.
.. they just put the brakes on their popularity
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The future seems to be H264/AAC.
DivX Plus is H.264/AAC/MKV. The DivX software bundles already include a free player and web player, and DivX Plus certified devices were announced at CES.
There are hundreds of millions of consumer elctronics devices on the market that can play DivX. Many on them, including my Phillips DVD player, will also play Xvid without additional conversion. Besides having DivX conversion software, I have other converters that will handle pretty much everything going and coming, including the 'proprietary' DivX. DivX is signing up corporation after corporation to carry DivX compatibility on board http://investors.divx.com/search.cfm?keyword=certified DivX saw the need for an extended file format and chose MKV. That's been added to their latest version. The response has been less than stellar. It apparently solves a problem that most people don't have. DivX apparently does, and anyone that doesn't care for the 'proprietary' aspect gets most of that functionality and less money shelled out via Xvid.
Just a quick look through the latest 100 movie file on TPB show 1 MKV, 1 MP4, 98 AVI.
So why should I listen to this Handbrake? What protocol have they developed? Oh, none. So what did they develop? The ability to use other peoples' protocols? I see. Well, I imagine doing that comes with some understanding of those other formats. So why haven't I heard about them before now? I seem to have done just fine without having heard about them before. Maybe more to the point, why am I only hearing about them now? Slashdotvertising? In any case, 'obsolete' is a strange thing to call 98% (by my simple straw poll) acceptance, unless one is using it in the sense that the marketoids do: "it means I want you to use what I say based on what I say about something else, betting on the fact that you don't know shit about any of it except that you wouldn't be caught dead using anything but the newest bestest thing. Which we will tell you when it comes available. Like we did last time." If I hear anymore about Handbrake I suspect it'll be this same message, until they just stop.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The key benefit of divx is that it doesn't take bloody supercomputer in order to decode HD content in software.
You can get a nice amount of compression when compared to MPEG2 without requiring a beefy CPU or dedicated GPU hardware to handle it.
It's clearly inferior in terms of quality. That might be relevant to your particular requirements, or not.
It's nice to be able to choose for yourself rather than some Mac mindset weenies removing the option.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
To me it seems that if you accept it as an input format you should be able to output it as well.
I am not a programmer so take this next bit of post for what it is... pure conjecture lol
But it seems like if your decoding something then the same amount of work is already done for doing output?
Also I agree if something is a program made to convert video then it should do as many formats as possible.
I am on Windows so I use a program called Format Factory, and it supports like a bazillion formats (well all the ones I have ever ran into)
http://www.pcfreetime.com/
If you're on a Mac, install ClickToFlash and on YouTube it'll give you the option of bypassing the Flash movie and playing the H.264 that Youtube serves up to their iPhone client, in a QuickTime viewer (which on Mac is a very good thing).
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
That doesn't change the fact that a device with divx support will play nearly every divx/xvid file, and h264/x264 players are SOL with the majority of the encodes I've seen so far. Many only work properly on a computer, and not on mobile devices or dedicated gear (even though changing two encoding options while leaving the bitrate/filesize the same makes the file play...).
If it weren't for the fact that Android doesn't seem to have implemented a divx/xvid codec at all, I'd probably still be using it (and be watching my TV rips without needing to transcode first).
Handbrake 0.9.4 does support multiple audio and subtitle tracks, if you select mkv as the file output format.
Xvid and divx (mpeg-4 part 2) are far less resource-intensive than h.264. I don't know if anyone's ever tried playing a reasonably sized h.264 encoded video on a PIII, but it usually doesn't work out so well. Avi and divx I'm not so sure about, but I don't see why they had to get rid of xvid. Maybe I'm behind the times, but most of the time when I decide to re-encode something it's because I need to play it on a slow budget box like the ones they have at school.
Based on the video id, the actual file location of the video itself can be found. My ipod will play the videos in its hardware decoder, since it doesn't have flash installed. It just connects directly to an mp4 video file. No reason that a browser script couldn't do the same thing.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Except Xvid has always been open and works just fine across multiple devices.
You mean Xvid is an open implementation of the proprietry MPEG 4 layer 2 closed standard.
You mean just like x264 is an open implementation of the proprietry MPEG 4 layer 10 closed standard?
X264 is a terrible standard, with various files and options breaking support on some devices and programs. Other files just won't play at all. It just creates tedious compatibility issues.
x264 is an open implementation of h264, which is exactly as well specified as MPEG 4 layer 2.
Of note, one of the major benefits of Handbrake is it has presets – one of them is called "universal", videos produced with it will play almost anywhere.
Also of note, MPEG 4 layer 2 had exactly the same problems with portability to devices, that is, devices can chose to implement only the low-power parts of the standard, or to put bandwidth or resolution limitaitons on what they can play. This hasn't changed with layer 10.
Interesting. Does that work with stuff like Hulu as well? I barely visit youtube, but I tend to watch something on Hulu a couple times a week...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Based on the video id, the actual file location of the video itself can be found. My ipod will play the videos in its hardware decoder, since it doesn't have flash installed. It just connects directly to an mp4 video file. No reason that a browser script couldn't do the same thing.
I believe the ClickToFlash plugin for Safari does exactly that (or, more exactly, provides a user-selectable option to do exactly that).
#DeleteChrome
That depends on how desperately you want to restart Firefox. Seeing that the script managed to crash mine (3.5.7 on Snow Leopard) twice within two minutes (introducing fun effects like "the video is overlaid every single tab" along the way), I'd recommend it only if you really want to see crash recovery in action.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If your running Windows you might try a program called Format Factory its free and it is amazing in that it can convert almost any format with very little loss in quality.
FYI, Format Factory 2.2 (the newest version, released in December) appears to have the Generic.dx!kdh trojan, according to McAfee. This is a recently reported trojan, and is only discovered with DAT files less than 12 days old. I downloaded Format Factory 2.2 from 3 different sites and while the zip file names were slightly different, all three were reported as having an exe file infected with Generic.dx!kdh.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_252791.htm
There is not much information on this trojan right now, but it appears to be a member of a family which disable protective software and install IRC back doors for DDOS attacks or for later installation of other malware.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_141693.htm
Maybe it's a false positive. And maybe the developer's machine is spreading something unpleasant.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Another comment which resulted from discovering a trojan signature in Format Factory. It may be "free as in beer", but it's yet another example of a Chinese company appropriating "free as in freedom" software, and claiming ownership of it. The Format Factory installer contains mplayer, mencoder and avcodec compiled with support for libamr, libfaac, xvid and x264. However, contrary to the licensing conditions for all of these, there are no sources provided or made available, and Format Factory claims copyright on everything (does not even acknowledge the FOSS items it includes).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
There's another one called "YouTube Perfect" which provides similar functionality. Maybe you want to try that.
Last I checked the current Flash 10.1 beta plugin actually plays HD FLVs with minimal CPU usage thanks to using GPU acceleration for the video decoding...
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Nothing beats MKV+h.264 when you want to put your DVDs in your HTPC/media center and keep all audio tracks, subtitles and chapter markings, while using a third of the needed diskspace compared to a full ISO copy. This, and reencoding your movies for your portable devices, are the main use-cases that Handbrake is optimized for. This is as legit as it gets, IMHO. Also, I'm pretty sure that most "scene" release groups don't use it for their releases, they use a collection of other tools.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
ROFL.
Maybe the de-facto standard on OSX, but this is the first time I even heard there is a Windows version of Handbrake. People are using ffmpeg and other programs that use the X264 library. Yeah, Handbrake is one of those programs that uses it, but Handbrake is not the front end folks are using on Windows.
I have devices that will play some videos, but not all.
They're called profiles. You can't expect cheap, battery-powered devices to be able to decode High Profile content. It really gets the usable bitrate down, but boy does it use a lot of processing power to decode!
Oh, and to nitpick - x264 is VideoLAN's encoder. The codec is called MPEG-4 AVC in the MPEG world, and h.264 in the ITU world.
Summary gives the impression that MP4 and M4V are different (or platform-flavoured), but I have no trouble with renaming them back and forth.
M4V is iTunes-friendly, certainly. But that's a file association that can be tweaked in a few clicks.
V is just shorthand for video to clarify what the content inside the container is. A for audio, B for bookmarked audio, R for ringtones, etc. Apple is doing the same thing that Microsoft is doing with ASF, WMA and WMV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14#.MP4_versus_.M4A_file_extensions
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/284094
It probably has something to do with the fact that the freeware software doesn't have to:
1. Have tie-ins for 47 different kinds of DRM.
2. Have 17 different places to tie-in ad and placement revenue.
3. Incorporate with the company's latest media store concept (while breaking compatibility with the last one).
4. Make sure that the company's proprietary codec works better than any of the others.
5. Incorporate Bob's idea. Everybody knows that it is a dumb idea, but Bob's uncle is the executive VP of sales, so...
echo "noembed" >> ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf
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