HandBrake Abandons DivX As an Output Format 619
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 It is obsolete.'"
They don't like supporting it (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bah, AVI is ultimately legacy. Switched to mpeg4. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Talking about apples and oranges. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Because H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC is Mature! (Score:5, Informative)
Because H.264/MPEG-4 AVC [wikipedia.org] is Mature! We have availability of fast and reliable open source x264 [wikipedia.org] H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder and the wide spread usage of Matroska (MKV) [wikipedia.org] container files and MPEG 4 (MP4) [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]).
Also Audio Video Interleave (AVI) [wikipedia.org] 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:HandBrake? (Score:5, Informative)
It's hardly a de-facto standard; it's just another utility using ffmpeg and x264.
Re:Um. (Score:4, Informative)
As of last year or so the Xbox 360 plays MPEG-4 files just fine. I have mine play them over the network from my server.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Ummm, what? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Windows 7 plays H.264 by default (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you need to stop using a 7 year old OS as your reference of what "Windows does".
Re:Ummm, what? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
They're both MPEG-4 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Informative)
Only Windows 7 will decode XviD or H.264 without extra software. With AVI it would be possible to use this tool to create videos only Windows 7 could play without extra software. But AVI is an obsolete container (which is why Microsoft stopped using it).
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
VLC is a poor choice. Media Player Classic Home Cinema [sourceforge.net] supports Windows's DirectShow media playback system, and supports hardware accelerated decoding, hardware accelerated rendering, codecs other than those included with MPC-HC, etc.
Big FD. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [divx.com] 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:They don't like supporting it (Score:2, Informative)
The program never supported DivX to begin with; it used XviD. And MPEG-4 Part 2 (the standard XviD implements) is known to be inferior to H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10. H.264 is much more widely used than MPEG-4 Part 2 - in satellite TV, videoconferencing, Blu-ray, etc.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
With the most recent MS-provided updates for Windows Media Player on Windows XP (and Windows 7), it does support playback of XviD and DivX without installing any third-party CODECS. This is a relatively new development.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:2, Informative)
Windows Media Player 12 (Win7) will play most MPEG4/AVC files, including XviD and DivX out of the box. I believe it's due out soon for previous versions of Windows.
Re:Time synch (Score:5, Informative)
AV-sync is still an issue for modern containers, like MKV, it's just that most GUI front ends automatically handle the parameters when encoding for you - command line pilots still need a calculator.
The biggest drawbacks of the dinosaur AVI container format include: it doesn't support chapters (ah, the hacks in Encarta to work around that); it doesn't support included subtitle streams; it doesn't support alternative video tracks; it doesn't support alternative audio tracks. Heck, in it's 1.0 version it didn't even support multi-gigabyte files. I'm all for covering it with another shovel-full of dirt.
If killing-off support for the AVI container means a few casualties like DivX/XviD codecs (and it doesn't, except for embedded solutions that don't have firmware upgrade paths) there'll be no tears here - there have been much better quality and higher efficiency codecs to replace them for a number of years.
This is of course wrong (Score:2, Informative)
The dvix people added muxed in subtitles, chapters a long time ago, these people just can't be bothered.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
A common annoyance with many media players, WMP included, is not having the right codec. WMP will try to detect which codecs are required and provide a location to download them, but this is hit-and-miss and less than convenient if all you want to do is play a video. In recognition of this, WMP12 includes support for H.264 video, AAC audio, and both Xvid and DivX video, in addition to all the formats supported by WMP11 in Vista (MPEG2, WMV, MP3, etc.). With these new codecs, WMP should support the majority of video found on the Internet out of the box.
Re:They're both MPEG-4 (Score:2, Informative)
The 360 can already play h.264 in an mp4 container (only 2-channel AAC, though). Zune will stream that natively, and WMP11 can be coaxed to stream mp4 using a registry hack (WMP will list anything it can see in its library, and while WMP12 understands mp4 immediately WMP11 needs an extra registry key to make it see mp4s). The 360 currently doesn't understand the mkv container, but transcoding can be done pretty efficiently. Now that DivX is using mkv, it'd be nice to get an update that would allow the 360 to understand mkv directly.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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:Time synch (Score:2, Informative)
AV-sync is still an issue for modern containers, like MKV, it's just that most GUI front ends automatically handle the parameters when encoding for you - command line pilots still need a calculator
It works just fine with the HandBrakeCLI program.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They don't like supporting it (Score:5, Informative)
Without commenting on why Handbrake has dropped support for AVI (I'm sure they have their reasons), it is a simply bit of a shame for users looking to make highly portable content. DivX is one of the most widely supported formats on devices ranging from portable media players, DVD and Blu-Ray players, digital TV's, set-top boxes, and even mobile phones. It's always been a major goal to make it extremely easy for people to take content from their computer and move it into their living room or take it with them on the go, and there are now over 250 million DivX devices out there.
There is of course now also DivX Plus, which uses H.264/AAC/MKV, and Handbrake can still output that. You can actually already find a preset for Handbrake here [divx.com]. Devices certified for DivX Plus will be arriving this year, with announcements already covering Philips [divx.com] and Seagate [divx.com]. DivX Plus Web Player already supports these files so you can upload your DivX or DivX Plus file to any standard HTTP server and embed it directly in your web pages. It enables viewers to watch these files in embedded, windowed, or full-screen modes and save them for device transfer later. DivX Player provides free playback on Windows and Mac, and we also include an MKV splitter for Microsoft Media Foundation in Windows 7. By consequence of that, you can watch DivX Plus files with hardware acceleration and already stream them to Windows Media Center Extender and UPNP devices.
So again, for so many people who own DivX devices, it's unfortunate, but there are also many other tools out there that will do the job. It's at least nice to see them supporting MKV, which will work in DivX Plus devices in future.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Talking about apples and oranges. (Score:1, Informative)
mkv is also a container...which can contain DIVX. All modern players (at least those based on widely available open source libraries) can play any number of codecs out of any number of container formats. They're dropping DIVX, period, otherwise they could plop it into a MKV container and be done with it.
Re:Because H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC is Mature! (Score:3, Informative)
Protip: DivX Plus is H.264/AAC/MKV, and DivX desktop software has been playing and creating it for the past year. DivX Plus Web Player lets you embed it in your web pages and serve it from any HTTP server, and the first DivX Plus certified devices were announced at CES. You can even find DivX Plus presets for Handbrake here [divx.com]!
Sense Of Perspective (Score:3, Informative)
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.com] 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.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:2, Informative)
Bullshit. The most widely used video containers are the MPEG-2 containers: transport stream, used by DVB and ATSC (accounting for most digital TV broadcasts), and program stream, used by DVD.
AVI is infrequently used in other situations. Some cameras still create AVI files, and AVI is commonly used for low-quality pirated video. But more and more pirates are choosing modern containers like MKV. AVI is not used for video streaming (WMV, FLV are), and WMV and MP4 account for non-pirate video downloads.
AVI is clearly obsolete. It is missing many important features required and implemented by modern video containers. Further development been more or less abandoned by its creator (Microsoft) in favor of newer containers like WMV.
Re:Talking about apples and oranges. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is of course wrong (Score:5, Informative)
The DivX people now also support DivX Plus, which is H.264/AAC/MKV including surround sound, multilingual subtitles, chapter points, metadata, multiple titles, and more :)
Check it out:
http://www.divx.com/en/electronics/solutions/high-definition/divx-plus-hd-showcase [divx.com]
DivX Plus devices were also announced at CES. Look for Blu-Ray players from Philips and the FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player from Seagate initially. There's even a Handbrake preset here [divx.com].
- Al / DivX person ;)
Handbrake 0.9.4 does support multiple subtitles (Score:2, Informative)
Handbrake 0.9.4 does support multiple audio and subtitle tracks, if you select mkv as the file output format.
Re:Time synch (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest drawbacks of the dinosaur AVI container format include: it doesn't support chapters (ah, the hacks in Encarta to work around that); it doesn't support included subtitle streams; it doesn't support alternative video tracks; it doesn't support alternative audio tracks.
I have no problem using multiple audio tracks in my AVI files.
I rip my DVDs by converting the video to DivX and keep the original audio (AC3 or DTS). If there are multiple audio tracks (like commentary), they all get added to the AVI file, and although mplayer can't seem to switch audio tracks without a stop and restart, my networked DVD player and PMP don't seem to have any problems.
For non-HD sources, the only problem I have with AVI containing DivX+AC3/DTS is the 2GB file size limit. I have a few DTS DVDs with 1.5Mbps DTS, and those absolutely have to be split into multiple files to keep the video bitrate around 2Mbps.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Time synch (Score:2, Informative)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Informative)
Personally I like AVI and DivX/XviD.
Why? Because I can download it, copy it to a USB stick, stick that in my DVD player, and watch the video on my TV. DivX is the only format supported by that DVD player. And it's for sure not an old model, I bought it maybe a year ago.
And before you start saying "just play it on your computer": my TV has a comfy sofa in front of it, is almost twice the diagonal of my monitor, and is in a room big enough to watch with more than one person at a time. Particularly important when watching something with my 3-year-old.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Windows 7 has support for divx/xvid now aswell as newer formats like mp4/h264 and even x264 but for mayority of those you need haali media splitter but the video in it self is supported AND accelerated (by the videocard if you got one that support DXVA)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe VLC is better in playing video with low CPU load, but that doesn't really concern me much, having a semi-recent processor. It definitely plays more file formats out of the box, which is really nice I admit, but ergonomically, it's (in my opinion) too unpolished. For example I love the way you can use your keyboard to make small/medium/big jumps in Windows Media Player using [SHIFT]+[R.Arrow], [R.Arrow] and [CTRL]+[R.Arrow] respectively. I love the fact that you don't have to open a seperate window for the playlist, and you can add a whole season of show X from the explorer window by right-clicking.
There are a few more nuisances in VLC on the usage front, but those are the major ones, and that's enough for me to prefer WMP, even though that means I have to go out of my way to install a few codecs here and there.
Ofcourse that doesn't mean I don't have any gripes with Windows Media Player. I do, but just less than with VLC, and I also have VLC installed, because there are some things WMP even with the right codecs just refuses to play which doesn't seem to bother VLC that much. I just don't have it set up as the default player.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Informative)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Informative)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:2, Informative)
"vsync? Tearing?? Do you have a screenshot of what you mean?"
It's difficult to get a screenshot of this since it's only visible while
playing video. Imagine a camera panning across a group of people.
When you watch the resulting video from this shot, a person's legs
and waist might appear offset from their torso and head -- like if
you took scissors to a photo and cut it in half horizontally, then
slid the two pieces relative to each other.
It's very annoying to the eye once you start to notice it. I'm sorry ;-)
if your viewing is ruined from here on out...
- jw
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
I could be wrong, but afaik Windows 7 has DivX built-in [apcmag.com]. It also plays most Quicktime .MOV files out of the box.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Informative)
For example I love the way you can use your keyboard to make small/medium/big jumps in Windows Media Player using [SHIFT]+[R.Arrow], [R.Arrow] and [CTRL]+[R.Arrow] respectively.
VLC does that...
CTRL + L/R arrow, ALT + L/R arrow and SHIFT + L/R arrow for big, medium and small jumps forwards and back.
Trojan - Generic.dx!kdh (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nai.com]
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 [nai.com]
Maybe it's a false positive. And maybe the developer's machine is spreading something unpleasant.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:1, Informative)
Software that handles AVI files generally can't handle multiple audio or video streams, even if they are possible. There's no standard way to do subtitles. There's no standard way to do either B-frames or variable bit rate audio - both can be done, with decreased file compatibility and some extra overhead. There's pretty much no error handling or recovery - the ability to play corrupt AVI files depends entirely on how much effort the decoder goes through. Same goes for partial or truncated AVI files. It's possible, with a carefully arranged AVI file, to stream them over a network, but the interleaving is too coarse for this to work very well.
The stuff Apple do, DRM aside, is well beyond the capabilities of the AVI container. It simply couldn't do what Apple use it for.
Ditto for Microsoft - there's a reason they ditched AVI, and moved over to ASF.
License Violations (Score:5, Informative)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
You're out of date. Win7 supports DivX, XviD, h264, AAC, and a number of other formats right out of the box. I've used WMP (on a clean install) to play .mov files that were recorded by a digital camera and encoded as "QuickTime movies" in some MPEG 4 variant.
Perhaps the Handbrake folks just decided that the time to drop support for a format is when Microsoft includes support for it out of the box?
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:HandBrake? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Informative)
The word is deprecated. Like obsolete, except people are still using it, but you wish they weren't.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Informative)
I have devices that will play some videos, but not all.
They're called profiles [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
File extentions (Score:2, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/284094 [microsoft.com]
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, the video portions of the datastream are implementations of MPEG-4 Part 2. But pairing that up with mp3 audio and tossing them into an AVI container (which is what this is all about) is totally non-standard, and is quite frankly an ugly hack.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Informative)
echo "noembed" >> ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
AVI is used in digital camers because it's extremely easy to program a very basic writer for it. Most digital cameras create videos compressed in Motion-JPEG and uncompressed audio.
When it only has some basic settings like changing frame rate and resolution, the code inside the digital camera just reads about 2 KB of data from memory, changes the values for resolution and framerate in the bytes, writes the bytes to card at the beginning of the file and then alternates a frame of video and a frame of audio until the end of the recording, where it writes an index with the positions of each video and audio frame in the file.
So it's all about minimum processor usage - the motion jpeg frames come already prepared from the hardware chip and dumped in memory, from where they're just dumped to the SD card, and there's no library required to be included in the digital camera software.
Keep in mind that a regular 100$ camera has about 1-4 MB of flash for firmware and software and up to 64 MB of ram for processing images so sometimes you don't have 100-300 KB of space to include libraries that add support for MKV or MP4 containers.
Regular Virtualdub and Avisynth have no problems processing these AVI files with Motion-JPEG compressed frames.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:3, Informative)
Got an Xbox 360 or a PS3? Problem solved.
Otherwise, $80 will get you a Blu-ray player that handles h.264 and upscales DVDs to 1080p [tigerdirect.com].
Or there's AppleTV. Or Popcorn Hour. Or MviX boxes. Or various $90 media players [tigerdirect.com] that access any USB hard drive you have hanging around. (That one even supports ext3.)
I mean, yeah, I have a DVD player that supports DivX that I used a few years ago. But frankly, it's a hell of a lot more convenient to pull stuff across my network or stick it on a hard drive than to mess with burning DVDs, even ignoring the h.264 issue. Spend the $100, you'll thank yourself.