- Apr 10, 2001
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Perhaps I found a new format for HD clips
DivX 6 aims at CE market with enhanced editing, performance
By Scott Fulton
June 15, 2005 - 01:03 EST
San Diego (CA) - In what may be its most significant product rollout, DivX Networks is announcing today the launch of the DivX 6 video encoding format, the company's latest rendition of MPEG-4. Coupled with this new encoding is the simultaneous launch of the DivX Media Format (DMF), a wrapper around DivX 6 videos that enables consumers to create sophisticated menu pages and chapter titles, similar to what today's DVDs provide.
DivX has found its way into DVD players, as a secondary decoding format embedded in hardware. To convince hardware manufacturers to embrace DivX 6, the company has to win over the consumer video market with its key points of appeal: easier editing and sharing of more portable video files with better, richer performance and more interactive features.
"It's a matter of creating a much richer experience for people who are very conscious of the ratio between size and quality," said Tanguy LeBorgne, Director of Product Marketing for Pinnacle Systems, whose long-running Studio and Studio Plus series of consumer video editing tools will be among the first to directly support DivX 6 in forthcoming updates.
Smaller size, improved performance
Technically, the quality and performance of DivX 6 video files is noticeably enhanced over editions rendered under previous versions. Demonstration DivX 6 videos provided to Tom's Hardware Guide by DivX Networks show what this reporter's vision recognizes as substantive improvements in rendering, especially with regard to minimizing visible artifacts and smoothing out diagonal borders and transitions. Historically, DivX 5 format videos were best shared over the Internet by first wrapping them in ZIP files for better compression. In my tests with the new DivX Encoder--a tool scheduled to replace the company's Dr. DivX--I could re-encode DivX 5 files as DivX 6, with the resulting file size not much larger than the ZIP-compressed DivX 5 file. This implies a compression scheme that is just about as capable as the most aggressive Lempel-Ziv algorithms available.
divx2 "I think one of the successes of DivX," commented LeBorgne, "is obviously related to its fantastic compression capabilities, while retaining the quality of the original format. Especially in Europe, where people are to a certain degree more conscious of saving space, it's been quite a hit."
As Jérôme "Gej" Rota, DivX's popular and beloved creator and chief engineer, told Tom's Hardware Guide, his team achieved these performance improvements by paying close attention to the codec's key variable, which designates the tradeoff between file size and playback quality: "There's a mode called 'Insane,'" Rota told us, "which is the best mode of the codec that gets you 20 to 40% smaller file size [than with DivX 5]." Newer picture analysis techniques, Rota stated, reduce the distortion rate of a video frame prior to reducing its size, thus enabling the compression algorithm, he said, "to squeeze more of the bits it's going to allocate into a particular piece of the picture."
One simple measure of a video format's performance in consumer electronics, such as a disc player, is how many artifacts are visible in an image during freeze-frame mode. Earlier MPEG codecs update only the most different elements of a frame at any time, and sometimes drop most or all of a frame when little or no change is detected. As a result, freeze-frames for these older codecs can present shimmies or mosaics. "The DivX codec never drops frames," Rota pointed out to us, very emphatically. "Because we're targeting entertainment content, this is something we choose not to do. If you're looking at a movie, you will always have 24 frames per second or 30, depending on your input frame rate.
"That's very important for us," continued Rota, "because from a perceptual point of view, if you start dropping frames, the eyes are very sensitive to that. One of the main drawbacks of all those lossy codecs is that they tend to create blockiness. One of the big advantages of DivX 6 is, when you use an advanced mode, it significantly decreases the amount of blockiness you may experience." As Rota explained, DivX 6 adds a new deblocking filter that smoothes areas of a frame after their pixels are decoded, but prior to being rendered. However, added Rota, the filter intelligently analyzes the scene texture first, so as not to smooth regions of a frame where variation patterns can be ascertained to have been intentional.
New media format provides DVD-like experience
Among the demonstration files provided to us by DivX Networks was a version of the independent, fan-made Star Wars film, "Revelations," which has already made its rounds across the Internet in different formats. What was different about this file was not just that it was re-mastered in DivX 6, but that it also contained a fully-functional, fully-convincing "hyperdrive" menu screen, produced by the film's creators, Panic Struck Productions, specifically to demonstrate the new DivX Media Format.
As Jérôme Rota told us, a DMF wrapper file can contain multiple DivX 6 video files of varying resolutions. Chapter points within the titles may be linked to frames within any of these files, through transitions that may also take place in separate videos. Like the last three Star Wars theatrical releases, I found this edition of "Revelations" enjoyable for its achievements in rendering and cinematography over plot substance.
Other DVD-like features that will make their way to DMF include multiple-language subtitle sets, alternate audio tracks, and file tags similar to EXIF tags for digital still images. These tags will provide classifications and metadata for video files, and may also conceivably support digital rights management.
As DivX Networks' corporate communications director, Tom Huntington, told us, the new DMF format can also be exploited for making easily shared video slideshows, featuring both DivX 6 videos and still images. "This will be a true multimedia slide show that can contain photos and videos within a single .DIVX file," said Huntington. "It'll play back on devices that will be coming into the market soon; and because of the great compression of DivX, it'll be easily transferred online, or in a variety of ways." Unlike Adobe Acrobat slideshows--which since version 6 can also be transferred to Video CD or to DVD--a DMF slideshow can contain full-motion video, in standard or true high definition.
Adding further to the richer media experience, noted Huntington, is the licensing of the Thomson/Fraunhofer Labs MPEG Layer-3 (MP3) codec, which will enable DivX 6 files to support MP3 Surround sound.
Will content providers, CE manufacturers, take DivX seriously?
Going forward, DivX Networks' strategy appears to be to generate renewed demand for embedded DivX codecs in CE equipment, by first stirring up interest in new features and functionality among the very consumers upon whom their manufacturers depend.
The key to DivX' long-term success, in the opinion of Kurt Scherf, Vice President and principal analyst with Parks Associates, is to convince the major providers of video content that DivX is their perfect partner. "One of the things that irritates DivX folks to no end," Scherf told us, "is this notion that all they're about is helping consumers pirate content. They're extremely adamant that their solution goes well beyond that; they've got their own DRM to protect the content. So I think the longer-term outlook is for them to be accepted by the content players' community."
To accomplish this, added Scherf, DivX has to first succeed with its short-term appeal to CE manufacturers and their consumers, "especially to the digital camcorder market, because the ability to record in HD and be able to make that content as efficient and as small as possible, is going to be a real driver for consumers going forward."
LSI Logic manufactures the Domino Programmable Standard Product Architecture, which is utilized in consumer-level as well as professional-grade video electronics, such as digital editing equipment. As LSI's senior strategic marketing manager, Neil Bullock, told Tom's Hardware Guide, Domino will be ready soon to support DivX 6 by virtue of its firmware-oriented upgradeability. This enables hardware with Domino architecture to support DivX 6 not by embracing it outright at first, but tentatively, progressively, in stages. "That gives us some flexibility as standards evolve, and new standards come up, to be able to support those standards," said Bullock.
Customer demand can more directly influence whether Domino supports one codec or another, including DivX 6. "For example, if you think that a particular feature is 'non-core,'" explained Bullock, "then you can take more of a software approach; then over time, if that feature becomes more and more established, you take more of a hardware approach." The implication here is that Domino does not have to wait for DivX 6 to mature, or for demand to swell, before some support for it can be provided. Customer input can create an almost cafeteria-like approach to codec support. But as Bullock noted, "we clearly respond to customer demand, and we're seeing increasing customer demand for support of the DivX codec."
"I think one of the challenges of DivX," stated Parks Associates' Scherf, "is, for lack of a better term, to prove that it's a grown-up technology that can play with grown-up applications." To accomplish this, Scherf explained, DivX 6 has to prove itself as an efficient and portable format for file sharing, but also more robust in digital rights management, so that "file sharing" and "DivX" mentioned in the same sentence doesn't automatically create negative connotations--as it has in the past. At the same time it's proving itself as friendly to consumers, DivX must also present a picture of a mature format that's ready to support the major media and content providers--the same companies haggling now over the new standard for HD DVD.
Following a DivX 6 briefing that DivX Networks presented to video market analysts, including Scherf, as he related to us, "one of the comments I had was, 'I would classify you as a D-I-Y--a do-it-yourself, consumer-oriented product.' I think there are a lot of things that make a consumer product very user-friendly, and very popular with consumers, that obviously make the content providers nervous. So I think that DivX's challenge is moving beyond this notion [of] do-it-yourself--if you're ripping a DVD, you're using DivX-- [toward] more of a provider of a full solution to the content industry." Scherf expects DivX to make its initial play to independent content providers, especially in the Internet video-on-demand space, before approaching the major studios--if, indeed, they really can make it that far.
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