Why does DivX suck?

[foggy]

This thread prompted by joohang's remarks in another thread...



<< << why windows media? media player will play the divx just fine

Divx codec if you need.

mediaplayer itself comes with windows i'm confused.. bah >>


Why? Because DivX is suck.

This belongs to a different thread, though. >>



What? How does divx suck? I'm intrigued... I thought divx is pretty darn good actually. DVD quality movies in one 700mb disk? I know there are better codecs coming out that claim 4 times better compression, but that will probably be a while off. Is there a better video codec than divx at the moment?

 

[Evadman]

I missed something. DivX sucks?

 

[SWScorch]

I believe a better quetion would be: Why doesnt it suck?

Actually, I've no idea. I dont really know what DivX is or what it does, only that I have to download it to see some movies.

 

[Imdmn04]

no way divx come even close to dvd quality with 700mb, maybe with 1200mb to 1300mb. although i do have to admit that quality is a bit better than mpeg1 with the same size, but not that much better

 

[ViperVin2]

WHO SAID DIVX SUX?!?!
u can get good quality movies w/ divx

 

[b0mbrman]

Is it something about how you can't jump to positions, only seeK?

 

[Hubris]

DivX sucks only if you compare it to DVD. However, in a size for size comparison, DivX can definitely hold its own. Besides, almost all DivX encoded files are illegal to some extent, so, for something free, it's pretty damn good.

 

[ProviaFan]

DivX can jump to positions, but on less-than-the=fastest hardware, it kinda lags a bit when you do that. Anyway, I love divx, but they take forever to acquire on my dialup connection.

 

[Superwormy]

DivX definitally does NOT SUCK, excellent compression for the file sizes, awesome for backing up DVD movies onto your HD... DVD movies YOU OWN!!!

 

[LiQiCE]

Perhaps someone is thinking of the old Divx format that you could rent movies on and not DivX the MPEG4 based video encoder? The old Divx discs which worked off of a "rent and throw away the disc" really did suck at its original pricing scheme.

BTW- I wish you could stream video using the Divx format ... For example, with MPEG1 or with MP3 audio if you have a partially downloaded file (or one that is currently being downloaded) you can start playing it right away. But with Divx, you have to download the entire movie before you can start watching it... Sortof sucks when you're on a modem and trying to download a 30 meg video, gotta wait 5 hours for it to download! ... Oh well, quality wise, Divx is a lot nicer than MPEG-1 with roughly the same or smaller size.

 

[ILikeSprite]

<< I missed something. DivX sucks? >>

 

[killface]

DIVX sucks for those of us who would rather download MPEGs or VCD's and play them on our DVD/VCD players. It's just a pain in the ass to decompress them into a burnable format.
DIVX doesn't suck for people playing movies on their computers.

 

[beamrider]

Divx was the "rent a movie" format that sucked.

Divx ;-) the codec is pretty damn good for what it is.

 

[crypticlogin]

<impatiently looks at watch>

Seems like voodooguy is late on his cue.

 

[Nefrodite]

divx sucks because it doesn't have special features of the quality of dvd. sure for a 2-3 cd rip it might look pretty close even on a good tv if you have a pc with very nice outputs(unlikely), but flipping discs? good god hell no. lack of surround sound.. choice between dd and dts, commentary tracks, special features etc really blows. plus with dvds rental now is perfect, you pay 3 bux and get the same experience as when the disc was new. no dirty crunched worn videos and stuff well as long as you don't go to blockbuster with their special cuts and pan and scam only(they are trying) policy

it has its purposes, if i want to watch something on my laptop or say a pda then divx is fine, but for true movie experiences your just robbing yourself i guess the basic arguement is that you can't beat the quality for something thats free, but your times not free

 

[LocutusX]

Since this thread appears to be full on rampant cluelessness, I feel it's my duty as an MPEG expert and long-term member of this forum to put aside some of these myths.

Why might he have said divx sucks?

There are a number of reasons, depending on what he was referring to. He could have been referring to the old Circuit City divx rental model. That probably sucks, but since it's dead, it is irrelevant whether it sucked or not.

Or he could be referring to one of the two (2) MPEG-4 Video for Windows codecs that go by the name "DivX". That's right, only two. The first is "DivX 3.11a ;-) " (yes, the smiley is part of the name) and is a hack of Microsoft's MPEG-4 V3 version 4.x codec. The second is by DivXNetworks, Inc. and is fully legitimate and is known as the "DivX codec" (source of major confusion) and is currently at version 4.12.

The two have nothing to do with each other. The first was written by Microsoft, but a number of bytes in the DLL was modified (by a hacker named Gej) so that it could be used in general purpose AVI editing programs.

The second was written from scratch by a group of programmers looking to "cash in". They knew that the old DivX 3.11a codec would never be commercialized and was doomed to a life of pirate DVD transcodes, so they started a corporation, wrote a codec from scratch and began to tout it as the best thing since sliced bread. They eventually reverse-engineered the DivX 3.11a playback DLL enough so they could add DivX3 playback capabilities to the Divx4 codec, and to make it seem like the Divx4 codec was a logical progression from the Divx3 codec.

The problem, though, is that it isn't. There are a number of deficiencies with DivX 4.12 that are common to all codecs based on ISO MPEG-4 code. You will notice that MPEG-2 (DVD, SVCD, etc.) does not suffer from those deficiencies. Also, what is considered most "evil" about anything that comes out of DivXNetwork's labs is the fact that they "cashed in" and "sold out" the divx enthusiast scene. They apparently have added (or will be adding) some sort of content-control to the codec, similar to what is in WMA files. For this reason, many enthusiasts think it "sucks".

Also, the quality of a well-done Divx3.11a file compared to a Divx4.12 file is not much different. If you are very familiar with Divx3 tools, then the Divx3 file will look better. If you are a newbie, the Divx4 file will probably look better...


Of course, this is just a technical look at the two Divx codecs, and why a fan of Divx3.11a would say "DivX sucks" referring to DivX4.

Compared to SVCD or DVD, divx (both of them) can "suck" because they are not playable on standalones currently. And even if standalones gain that functionality in the future, they will likely only be able to play ISO standard MPEG-4 files, and not a DivX .avi file that has been burned onto a CD using the Microsoft Joliet CDFS filesystem.

 

[LocutusX]

<< BTW- I wish you could stream video using the Divx format ... For example, with MPEG1 or with MP3 audio if you have a partially downloaded file (or one that is currently being downloaded) you can start playing it right away. But with Divx, you have to download the entire movie before you can start watching it... Sortof sucks when you're on a modem and trying to download a 30 meg video, gotta wait 5 hours for it to download! ... Oh well, quality wise, Divx is a lot nicer than MPEG-1 with roughly the same or smaller size. >>



If DivX can't be streamed, it's because of the underlying wrapper -- the .AVI file.

Since the old DivX 3.11a ;-) codec was just a hack of Microsoft MPEG-4 V3, it certainly can be streamed -- if the underlying wrapper was a streaming media format. Like ASF. ASF was developed primarily to *stream*. And if you get an app like Media Cleaner 5 or SonicFoundry StreamingAnywhere, you can encode ASF files using Microsoft MPEG-4 V3 -- voila! Looks just like DivX.

 

[joohang]

Oh wow! Nobody badmouthed me yet.

Thank you for the lesson, LocutusX. I didn't know that there were different "DivX" out there. What's with the name "DivX" showing up so many times?

I was referring "is suck" to the hacked version. I just didn't like the fact that it was hacked off another codec.

I'm a fan of Windows Media because it can be streamed off my server and gives me a pretty good quality. I like DivX 4.11 (since it's legit) but it seems to be more CPU-intensive than WMV 8.0 is. Am I correct?

My laptop has quite a bit of trouble properly playing DivX 4.x movies. I installed Nimo, btw.

 

[LocutusX]

DivXNetworks likely chose the name "divx" because they saw themselves pioneers who were legitimizing a video codec, that up until now had been reserved only for pir8's and MPEG geeks. Since the old "divx" was already gaining momentum at that point, by keeping the name but attaching a "4" to the end, makes it seem like "the next version".

Truth be told, the next version of the divx3.11a codec is none other than the various Microsoft codecs that followed it, i.e. WMV7, 8, 9, etc.

Of course, you would be hard-pressed to use WMV7/8/9 to create a backup of a DVD that looks as good as one made using DivX 3.11a. There are tools available for DivX3 that far outclass anything Microsoft has come up with, in terms of best looking video quality. With WMV7/8/9 Microsoft has concentrated on streaming and on "decent looking" video at lower bitrates, while the tools for DivX3 are mainly meant to make video look as good as possible. Of course I'm referring to Nandub and it's successors.

If you are on a lower spec computer and are having trouble playing any sort of divx files, you can try to disable the DirectShow playback filters by going into your windows system directory and doing a "regsvr32 /u" on all of the files name divx*.ax.

Both Divx3 and Divx4 use such a filter to "smooth" on-the-fly and of course this uses up variable amounts of CPU time depending on how pixelated the source is to begin with and how much smoothing to apply (determined by a setting in the filter).

 

[RU482]

<< Divx was the "rent a movie" format that sucked.

Divx ;-) the codec is pretty damn good for what it is. >>



I think Divx the "rent a movie" format was a pretty damn good idea. How they went about marketing it was the sh!tty part (kinda like Beta and the new Oldsmobile ) If Divx the "rent a movie" format would have been hardware compatible to DVD (i.e. if the cheapo manufacturers like Mintek and Apex would have started producing players that were Divx/DVD compatible) you'd all be praising the wonders or Divx the "rent a movie" format.

Now, for watching movies on the computer (which, lets realize that how few people even know about "divx the codec") is pretty good, in terms of 2001/02 technology. In reality "Divx ;-) codec format", like said before, in single CD format, sucks. Sure I'm not comparing apples to apples, just commenting

 

[udonoogen]

divx is it. love it. now that im out of the dorms its a little more hard to come by tho. bummer.

edit: i think streaming video is the thing of the past. most have high speed internet access now

 

[foggy]

Holy cow LocutusX! Your explanation rocks. I actually just wanted to know what joohang meant by "divx is suck". But hey, you learn something new everyday... Never knew about the 2 divx formats. I started off using the hacked version i guess, but somewhere along the line i used the legitimate version without even knowing it. But I could have sworn there were more divx versions a while back... mostly done by different hackers trying different things here and there. ie. "angel potion" divx (whatever happened to that?)

But I'm a fan of divx. Yes, I think there is no substitute for the real thing (dvd), but I think divx delivers the best bang for buck (in terms of megabytes). Yes, it is a bit choppy now due to cpu utilization, but hey, cpu's will always increase in speed.

 

[joohang]

<< divx is it. love it. now that im out of the dorms its a little more hard to come by tho. bummer.

edit: i think streaming video is the thing of the past. most have high speed internet access now >>


Well I was playing around with one of the library computers and thought I'd put up some movies up on my server so that I can watch them while I kill time during breaks (or use my laptop instead).

Even if I used my laptop, I prefer to store the huge movie files on the server's HD and stream them. There's no way that I'll download hundreds of megs (or take up that much space on my laptop HD) just to watch a movie. Not to mention that these days, I prefer my laptop at home and just carry my iPAQ.

Straming video is the future. Perhaps not in college dorms, but it will only grow in the IT market. Without streaming, DivX is not an ideal format for distributing motion picture over the Web.

 

[manly]

I like DivX ;-) but it does suck for these reasons:

1. Encoding is very CPU intensive. I realize my P3-800 is getting old , but it takes a god-awful amount of time for me to do a quality rip/encode session.
2. Video encoding is a complex procedure. I don't mind the complexity too much myself, but the end result is that 90% of the rip jobs out there are poor at best. This gives the codec an undeserved bad name. The tools are getting somewhat better, but they will always be for the technically-inclined.

Streaming video is slowly becoming more popular, but it'll always be a niche service.

Video on demand is best served by cable/digital cable/satellite. Most people don't want to watch movies/shows/video on their PC monitor anyway.

Besides, broadband adoption is slower than expected, and even 1.5 Mbps throughput is not enough for high-quality full-screen streaming video. You'd probably need 4 Mbps or so, and why wait for Internet2 when cable/satellite already solves that problem?

In the meantime, you'll just have to accept low-quality 300 Kbps small-size clips for your Web-based streaming video. The IT market has little demand for streaming video, and neither does Hollywood.

 

[ThaGrandCow]

<< I believe a better quetion would be: Why doesnt it suck?

Actually, I've no idea. I dont really know what DivX is or what it does, only that I have to download it to see some movies. >>



Divx is awesome for a 1 main reason: It gets movies down to the absolute smallest size possible, and doesn't have any of those stupid squares that real player has in them.

Divx is the best video type there is out there.