At 12:10 AM 7/28/01 -0400, nj bloodline wrote:
>> Popularity has a way of deciding standards regardless of what standards
>> bodies dictate.
>Sure, but DiVx never caught on and I don't see to many DVD players
>supporting it. DiVX came out, I remember seeing it on TV and you purchased
Clarification time...
Divx (the dead pay per view DVD format) used plain old DVD MPEG-2 video,
just with an extra layer of encryption added to let them lock you out of
your own movies when they felt like it (in fact, I think people who bought
Divx movies stopped being able to play them at any price this past July, 2
years after the company ceased operations.) It had no real advantages and
plenty of disadvantages -- and only being sold by one vendor didn't help --
so it died. The explosive growth in DVD rentals since then demonstrates
how unnecessary it was.
DivX;-) (the pirate video format currently popular on Usenet and IRC) is a
hack of a Microsoft MPEG-4 video codec, usually using a hacked Fraunhofer
MP3 codec to handle audio. Its name is deliberately confusing and (partly)
meant as a stab against the video industry for trying to foist that other
lame format on us, though there are more esoteric reasons for the name too.
But other than that, the formats are unrelated. Maybe they even named it
that so no hardware makers could make DivX;-) players for fear of a
trademark lawsuit with the Divx people. And its name really is big D,
little iv, big X, semicolon, hyphen, right paren.
However, I notice with amusement that the DivX;-) people seem to have
bought the Divx trademark and divx.com domain name, and have dropped the
smiley from the name of the codec on the new site. It seems they think
they can make a commercial venture out of this. Even more confusion to
follow, no doubt.
Rob
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