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 It is obsolete.'"
Time synch (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They don't like supporting it (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:HandBrake? (Score:2, Interesting)
I smell a Linux guy :-p
More seriously, computers are used by everyone these days. This means they should be usable by anyone. That includes video files. So yes, .x264 is guilty: of not working reliably for ignorant users.
Hasn't Apple's success taught us anything ?
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:HandBrake? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Didn't know about it before (Score:1, Interesting)
I didn't know about handbrake before. Just sucked down the source and built it (ubuntu 9.10). Damn! It runs like a champ. On a corei7-920 it spits out a 115 minute film in 37 minutes (roughly quad speed). ./configure --launch ...and the thing goes like a house on fire.
I just uncompressed the source (tar -xjpvf HandBrake-0.9.4.tar.gz2) and then ran this:
#!/bin/bash
apt-get install subversion yasm build-essential autoconf libtool zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev intltool libglib2.0-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libhal-dev libhal-storage-dev libwebkit-dev libnotify-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev
cd HandBrake-0.9.4
cd build
make clean
make -j 16
make install
make doc
# For Testing
ghb
Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:2, Interesting)
There's another one called "YouTube Perfect" which provides similar functionality. Maybe you want to try that.