why divx?

Figment

I have read in a few digital video magazines that divx isnt actually that great, that its just a riped version of one of the mpeg formats with a few modifications.
There are much better codecs out there for smaller files and better quality so
why does everyone use divx?
is it just hype? are the magazines lying?
people are just believing what they read on the internet and following the herd?

Dustaz

its mpeg 4 isnt it?

Scruff

Originally posted by Dustaz
its mpeg 4 isnt it?

mpeg 4 is the format, divx is a codex used to encode/decode the mpeg 4 format.

LittleFigment, for the answers to your divx/mpeg4 questions u should look up tomhardware's audio and visual section.
he goes into great lengths on divx & mpeg4

http://www4.tomshardware.com/video/index.html

Red Moose

Isn't a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG4 AVI spec?

Basically I think it's awesome - the magazines and news sites are only harping on about in recent months but it's actually been around for quite some time. I used it first in around May 2000 to make an AVI rip of a DVD (can't play laser devices on airplanes, so make it a file that can be played on a HD, no problem).

Quality even then was great. It takes a bit to get the hand of optimising it definitely, and you need to mess around for a few hours doing certain scenes of a few seconds just to see the different effect of bitrate even (although there are stacks of tweaks).

I'd avoid magazines when dealing with stuff like this. Mostly magazine journos don't understand something that doesn't work straight away and with great ease - hence the initial linux skepticism in mags like PC Gamer in 1995. Not that DivX is really hard to do, but you *do* need to experiment.

I bought T3 last month to read up on gadget stuff, and they slated the new Jornada 560 series, which for all intents and purposes if without doubt the best PocketPC PDA out, better than the 3800 iPAQs without doubt. But it didn't look as good they say, so they donwgrade it, without mentioning what you *can* do on it that you *can't* on a iPAQ.

Basically, don't believe everything you read in magazines *especially* regarding stuff that has come in from the internet tech/hack subculture. DivX is also of dubious legality because I think DMCA is violated due the hax0ring they gave MS's codec. No magazine promotes anything that's on the borderline (except PC Zone who review MAME stuff monthly, but they walk the thin red line, eh?).

Roughly, you can get 2 hours of good quality video (certainly better than MPEG1), in whatever res you want, whatever screen size, whatever FPS into around 700MB. That would take around 10-12 hours on a P3-500, or just in realtime if Tom's recent DivX roundup is to be believed on 2GHz P4's (Intel helped with that one ).

bonkey

Originally posted by Red Moose
Isn't a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG4 AVI spec?

MPEG - Moving Picture Expert Group (or something like that),

MPEG 4 - a standard developed by said group.

It has nothing to do with MS.

I do seem to recall that DivX was built *before* MPEG4 was released, which is where its "dubious legality" comes from.

jc

Red Moose

I dunno, have a look on Google regarding MS MPEG4 v3 and DivX. I was under the impression that MS simply used MPEG 4 v3 in the Windows Media Player for their own Windows standard .AVI video.

The M is Motion by the way.

I think though that maybe the version 4 of DivX (Project Mayo) may *not* be of the dubious legality that version 3 was last year.....

tribble

DivX is brilliant - I've been using it for bout a year and a half now.

1 DVD = 5 gigs (average, varies alot)
With DivX you can produce a very high quality copy which is about 700 megs

Problem is it has been traditionally very hard to do.
1. Rip the DVD (5 mins)
2. Decrypt the DVD (15 mins)
3. Fire up an encoder and encode the audio and video (9 - 24 hours!)
5. Tweak the result (0mins - forever)
4. Realise you forgot something and start all over (several days)

Basically the learning curve is steep but the are many guides avaliable from places like www.dvd.box.sk DivX section.
The DivX 3 codec is a bit legally interesting but the DivX 4 codec has now come of age and is fully legal.
Get it here www.divx.com

Honestly if you like your films get to know DivX

sceptre

DivX 3 was of dubious legal state because it was a hacked MS codec.

DivX 4.x is completely legal.