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 It is obsolete.'"

Comments

foot.shoot();

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

Re:foot.shoot();

[nine-times]

Windows doesn't play DivX or XviD files by default. To my knowledge, Handbrake never encoded files that Windows would play without installing an extra player or codec.

Re:foot.shoot();

[nine-times]

Why would they care about what windows does?

Well it is still the dominant desktop OS. I'm not even saying they shouldn't care about Windows, but rather that h264 is not any weirder or non-standard than DivX. The way some people talk about it, you'd think h264 and AAC are strange inventions from Apple and therefore others shouldn't be expected to support them. On the contrary, DivX was the weird proprietary format, and h264 and AAC were created by MPEG.

Both H264 and AAC were created to be industry standards, replacing old MPEG video formats and MP3. Apple happened to be early to jump on board with them, but they aren't proprietary Quicktime formats. In short: this is what is supposed to be happening. Everyone is lining up behind the most advanced industry standards and slowly dropping legacy support. Even Microsoft is supporting h264 and AAC these days, and they hate standards.

Re:foot.shoot();

[Carewolf]

Guess it was ignorance of the meaning of the word then. Like it or not, AVI is still widely used. Until it
isn't, it will not be obsolete. You need a new word. Might I suggest one of the following: anachronous, antiquated, antique, archaic, behind the times, dated, old-hat, out, outdated, outmoded, passé, unfashionable

The word is deprecated. Like obsolete, except people are still using it, but you wish they weren't.

Um.

[headkase]

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.

Re:Um.

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:I haven't used DIVX in years

[jo42]

All we need now is for .flv to dry up and blow away...

Bah, AVI is ultimately legacy. Switched to mpeg4.

[stevetures]

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.

Because H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC is Mature!

[JakFrost]

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.

Re:They don't like supporting it

[Anonymous Coward]

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!)

Re:HandBrake?

[nxtw]

HandBrake is the de-facto standard for creating h.264 files on Mac, Linux and Windows systems. You should get to know it; you won't miss that crappy, proprietary DivX.

It's hardly a de-facto standard; it's just another utility using ffmpeg and x264.

Re:Ummm, what?

[Microlith]

It's not implying anything of the sort. It's making the point that DivX was so popular, even Sony (who loves creating proprietary, Sony-only formats) added support for it to the PS3.

Big FD.

[xigxag]

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.

Re:HandBrake?

[nxtw]

This is not informative.

Except Xvid has always been open

XviD is an MPEG-4 Part 2 implementation; it is one of many.

X264 is a terrible standard

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.

with various files and options breaking support on some devices and programs

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.

Other files just won't play at all.

Possibly because they were out-of-spec, or not in a container the player supports. x264 isn't responsible for the user's ignorance.

Trojan - Generic.dx!kdh

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

License Violations

[AliasMarlowe]

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).