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 It is obsolete.'"
foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Insightful)
Dropping all formats that Windows play by default is IMO a bad decision. It may make the CCCP Project [cccp-project.net] more popular and spur more people to install Quicktime (yuck), but it'll also drive away lots of inexperienced users.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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: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: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.
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:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Insightful)
h264 is so incredible you don't need divx anyway.
My Pioneer DVD player doesn't play h.264. Neither does any other DVD player, except perhaps those that cost four figures (I haven't looked into that).
h.264 might be incredible, but I have no way of playing it on my TV.
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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 e
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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.
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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: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?
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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:Windows 7 plays H.264 by default (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, the Handbrake guys are saying Xvid is the past, H.264 is the present. Quoting what an OS that is 7 years old can do is just reinforcing what the Handbrake folks say.
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: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:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on how people actually use video containers, AVI isn't really obsolete yet. This is sad but true.
Sure you've got a fringe of people that push this stuff past the point where AVI falls over or where Quicktime falls over. Those people are few and far between. Apple itself really doesn't push the capabilities of container formats. So whining that AVI is obsolete is highly disengenous.
Re:foot.shoot(); (Score:5, Insightful)
obsolete -adjective
no longer in general use; fallen into disuse: an obsolete expression.
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
Judging from the vehemence of your response though, I'd probably go with unfashionable. You clearly have an emotional stake in video container formats for some reason, so that would be the most honest.
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: (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
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.
License Violations (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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:foot.shoot(); (Score:4, Informative)
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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,
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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: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.
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Um. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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.
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
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.
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XBox 360 can't decode h264? I thought it could. If not, then maybe they ought to get on board, since it looks like h264 is the current de facto standard.
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I don't know the format specifically, but I do know that the current version of handbrake rips my DVDs well for playback on the Xbox and my iPhone. I love it.
It should also be noted, it took PCauthority 2 months on the latest release to come to this realization? Authority they are not, clearly.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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!)
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As a developer nothing pisses me off like a user expecting me to have every version of my code installed on every conceivable platform ready to be debugged and rereleased with fixes, it's just not practical (especially for FOSS projects).
So yes it's annoying as hell, but having around all the old code and dependencies when you wan
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Yeah, but it wouldn't rxactly be a terrible burden on them to leave the older releases on the server, maybe with a "we don't support these anymore" notice.
Re:They don't like supporting it (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it's an annoyance, but when you are the premiere open-source solution for something as like video encoding, I think there is (or at least should be) a duty to at least keep the older releases around. Especially if they are a dropping features that were supported in the older versions. If the developers arrangement is so cluttered that they can't be bothered to keep the old releases available, then that points to ineptitude and makes for poor relations with the user-base. File management is not that hard compared to the groundbreaking features these developers are implementing. If they can't be reasonable and/or nice about things, perhaps someone else will step up to the plate and fork the project, because that's probably what it would take to get things into a sane state of being.
Annoying the users just opens the window for someone else to step in.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no threat from that at all, and if it turns out there is it's easy to implement legacy support and destroy all momentum the fork has at any moment.
Re:They don't like supporting it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They don't like supporting it (Score:4, Insightful)
But if he insulted you because you told him "wtf, Metro? no I want *that* newspaper over there not this piece of shit" then you entirely deserves to be insulted.
Re: (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: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.
Talking about apples and oranges. (Score:2)
DivX is a CODEC, AVI is a CONTAINER. Just because you don't support AVI doesn't mean you don't support DivX.
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.
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I had this same thought but I think the overall point was that the DivX codec in the AVI container is a piece of shit. MKV and MP4 are the future.
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Re:Talking about apples and oranges. (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Time synch (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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 D
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: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 ;)
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.
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DivX was always a bastard format anyway, from what I recall, it is MPEG 4 video with MPEG 2 audio in a way-obsolete Microsoft-designed container.
If there really is a big demand for it, some other software will support it, or there will be a fork.
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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]!
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Why would you buy a product in this day and age that doesn't support the most ubiquitous and popular portable video format: MP4. It's not a fancy new format. there were portable devices playing both MP4 ASP and H.264 AVC in 2004.
0.9.3 (Score:2)
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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: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.
Now it needs .m2ts support (Score:2)
mkv is a great format, but it isn't supported by Windows 7, Mac OS X (Quicktime), 360 or PS3.
I can however play an H.264/AC-3 .m2ts file on Windows 7 and PS3. Maybe Mac OS X too, I'm not sure (my Mac is too slow for HD video anyway).
Because of this I end up converting virtually all my .mkvs to .2mts files (using TSMuxer) and throwing the .mkvs away. I can stream them to my PS3 for viewing on my TV or watch them in VLC on my Mac or VLC or Windows Media Player on my Windows PC. .m2ts is a very capable format,
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.
you could say... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:5, Insightful)
All we need now is for .flv to dry up and blow away...
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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.
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Re:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:5, Informative)
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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...
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
echo "noembed" >> ~/.mplayer/mplayerplug-in.conf
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:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:4, Informative)
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:I haven't used DIVX in years (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (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: (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.
Re: (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:HandBrake? (Score:5, Informative)
It's hardly a de-facto standard; it's just another utility using ffmpeg and x264.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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:HandBrake? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [wikipedia.org]
Possibly because they were out-of-spec, or not in a container the player supports. x264 isn't responsible for the user's ignorance.
Re:HandBrake? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re: (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 a
Re: (Score:2)
AVI is obsolete; Microsoft uses the WMV container now, and has for about a decade now... DOCX is not obsolete.
Re: (Score:2)
H.264 support is much more widespread - it's in every Blu-ray player, every recent HD satellite receiver, every recent nVidia and ATI GPU and some recent Intel GPUs.