Whatever happened to DivX?

[Berryracer]

I remembered back in 2000 when DiVX was a must for watching downloaded movies. What happened to it now? did ffdshow/LAV Filters completely replace it?

I just saw a Divx update on Major Geeks and was like.. huh...they still use this?

 

[BrightCandle]

x264 happened to it. Better compression of 264 as well as the standard nature of it just meant DivX was superseded.

 

[Berryracer]

I see, thanks man

 

[Kerry56]

People still use Xvid/Divx codecs for compression. It can give results that are just as good as H264, but cannot do this in similar file sizes. If you don't mind larger files, it works fine.

Most of the people I see still using Xvid are those with older DVD players that are Divx certified, but won't accept mp4 or mkv encoded with H264.

 

[Berryracer]

I never knew what's the diff. between DivX, 3ivX, XVID, etc....

 

[Kerry56]

Divx and Xvid are both video codecs, forms of Mpeg-4 ASP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2

Xvid is from an open source project. Divx is proprietary.

H264 is a more modern codec, more formally known as Mpeg-4 Part 10, or AVC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

 

[Berryracer]

thanks a lot kerry for this simple explanation

 

[lamedude]

It looks like the scene has retired Xvid except for sports.
I switched to ffdshow then MPC-HC for playback. VLC replaced it for less technically inclined people. I know that DivX codec saw a brief revival during Youtube's early days since many videos had the water mark.

 

[Miramonti]

Didn't it cost money to [legally] encode to divx? Iirc, it required a license which wasn't free, which would have been a reason as good as any to abandon it.

 

[Kerry56]

Dr. Divx was a free converter that would output in .divx format. Looks like development stopped in 2008.

And Divx Inc. still offer a free encoder which I believe can output Divx, as well as H264 and the newest H265/HEVC codecs. They do charge for the mpeg-2 plug-in which lets you import DVD's. Beware of the installer for the Divx HEVC encoder though, as I seem to remember there is some sort of "extra" that will be installed if you aren't wary.

 

[lamedude]

The old VFW codec would watermark your video if you didn't pay. Everyone then switched to Xvid, but development continued so I guess someone was still using it.

 

[PliotronX]

Wasnt the installer for both the encoder and decoder bundled with some gnarly spyware back in the day?