How Are We Liking DIVX Compression?

Hi All

I've heard that DIVX is becoming popular for internet compression

Does anyone agree?

I've seen a standalone DIVX compressor, Mac only, has anyone used it?

thanks all

great being part of lafcpug

I've seen some excellent DIVX compression - it's been one of the standards for those bit torrent downloads of tv programs for a couple of years. It's capable of nice pictures and small file sizes, but it's not that simple to play - at least on a Mac - not sure about PCs. You used to need a couple of additions to your standard software to get it going, and that's also the bane of great codecs like H.264. Not everyone can automatically see it.

<<<I've heard that DIVX is becoming popular for internet compression >>>

No doubt from people interested in pushing the popularity of DivX. DivX is an offshoot of the MPEG4 family of fine compressors--an early one. It's closely allied with the Windows Media compressors since they both grew up in the same neighborhood and played stickball on the same streets.

Unfortunately, it's also closely associated with theft and copyright infringement.

[en.wikipedia.org]

It should be possible to encode MPEG4/H.264 and do very nicely in a standard encoding format. DivX, at least in our world, takes extra stuff to get it to work. If I was going to fall off the H.264 wagon, I would buy the licenses for Flash--another MPEG4 offshoot--hands down. Who's going to argue with YouTube?

Koz

Nope...not me. I am a Sorenson / H-264 fan.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Agree with above.

DivX was great but now there is h.264.

I am only guessing here, but it is possible that more people are able to play DIVX than Quicktime though, being a PC format making it suitable for internet distribution.

Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com

My experience is consistent with what everybody's said above. And one more thing -- downloading DivX to my QuickTime folder to enable playing that codec also seems to have messed up the operation of Safari. You start getting a "Can't create semaphore lock" error in Console, and loading web pages slows down considerably.

I suspect DivX because that error (and slow Safari) disappeared when I had to replace my system drive. But when I encountered a DivX file I needed to play, and downloaded the components, voila -- the problem comes back.


www.derekmok.com