Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: mzjo on 23 July, 2019, 08:04:06 pm
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Doing yet another flat clearnce and tidy out job I have acquired a DVD player that announces it does DivX. It looks remarkably recent as well. Which got me to wondering I haven't heard anything of DivX for rather a lot of years. So what happened? Displaced by MP4? and when? Les années passent et se resemble as we say!
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Never heard of it, but having read what it is/was:
DIVX was a rental format variation on the DVD player in which a customer would buy a DIVX disc (similar to a DVD) for approximately US$4.50, which was watchable for up to 48 hours from its initial viewing. After this period, the disc could be viewed by paying a continuation fee to play it for two more days. Viewers who wanted to watch a disc an unlimited number of times could convert the disc to a "DIVX silver" disc for an additional fee.[1] "DIVX gold" discs that could be played an unlimited number of times on any DIVX player were announced at the time of DIVX's introduction, but no DIVX gold titles were ever released.
I'm guessing it was displaced by streaming, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.
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I've only heard of the DivX codec, mp4 is DivX.
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MP4 is a container format. It can store video or audio encoded in a variety of ways. So DivX is one codec.
Main reason is newer codecs are better. ie more efficient compression, so better quality video or smaller file sizes.
Nowadays probably the most common codec is H264, or the newer H265. H264 is used by Blu-ray, and by YouTube etc.
Also a question of licencing. DivX is a proprietary format. If you wanted to encode a video, you had to pay for the official software. And companies making DVD players etc would have to pay for a decoding licence etc.
There is also Xvid format, which is free/open source, kind of based on DivX. It was quite popular for while.
H264 is not free, parts of it are patented. But they have said it can be used free of charge for non-commercial software.
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Shame in a way, it has wonderful Mission Impossible potential: This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours. Well, maybe it's not quite dramatic enough!
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Shame in a way, it has wonderful Mission Impossible potential: This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours. Well, maybe it's not quite dramatic enough!
Self-destructing DVD[1]s can be quite dramatic, judging by the wreckage I had to pick out of a drive that time...
[1] It was quite some time ago, so may have been a CD-ROM.
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The ill-conceived DIVX optical disc format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX) (different to the codec) flopped and was canned in 1999.
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Funny, my memory of DivX was a friend (and hacker) vaunting its capacities to save videos on CD. Was the software hacked to permit this sort of piracy? Was this just a french thing?
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Funny, my memory of DivX was a friend (and hacker) vaunting its capacities to save videos on CD. Was the software hacked to permit this sort of piracy? Was this just a french thing?
More a case that it was a codec that allowed you to compress a decent amount of watchable-quality video to a size that fitted on a CD.
Much like any recording technology, whether this was piracy-related depended entirely on whether you used it for piracy. It was popular with pirates because it worked well.