20 years later it's still a goto. Great tool.
Lets write a new video compression algorithm that is super efficient - great
this lets us compress movies so they can fit on cheap CD's, instead of DVDs. - great
We can now give those CD's away with movies on them - great And then every time someone puts one in a DivX player they can pay us to watch/rent it, instead of having to drive to blockbuster - wait, what?
Its easy, we'll just use a phone line that everyone has right near their entertainment center in their living room to phone home at night and send the data of what movies you watched and how many times. - what are they smoking?
Afaict these aren't related.
DivX the video codec started out as an unlicensed hacked version of Microsoft’s MPEG-4 v3 codec binary. Since it wasn’t a commercial product and was legally dubious, the author called it DivX ;-) with the smiley in the name.
When it became unexpectedly popular during the dot-com boom time, someone of course set up a DivX company that dropped the smiley, eventually rewrote the codec, and presumably acquired the trademark from the defunct DIVX (or just took it over if the registration expired, I don’t know).
and then, iirc, this is where xvid come into being. I think it was the same codec just re-written and given back to the opensource world, hence the reason for naming it "divx" spelled backwards.
This is one part of 2000s tech I'm happy to have mostly forgotten about.
You could encode a CD sized video file, burn it, and watch it.
People who have always lived in a world with great software like VLC and MPV and ffmpeg underestimate how hard it was to actually play a video file on your computer back in 2000.
& $ffmpegPath -i $_.FullName -r 23.976 -vf scale=1280:720 -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -crf 30 -preset 10 -g 300 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -ac 2 -c:s copy -map 0 $destPathI convert much to 720p PS3 compliant H264, for maximum device compatibility. I take an external drive with these files with me when I travel, and in 99% of the cases plugging it into hotel TVs just works.
At the very least, 1080p instead of 720p.
We transformed a relatively decent desktop into a ffmpeg transcoding machine, which would monitor files incoming from a samba share and it would output the converted file into another samba share.
It was just a bunch of scripts and cron jobs but it worked much better than I anticipated and it was mostly maintenance-free.
I agree with you in general, but it still annoys the crap out of me that QuickTime Player on macOS still won't load completely valid videos.
My basic "QuickTime compliant" options are:
-tag:v hvc1 -c:v libx265 -crf 28 -c:a eac3
Of course for everything else there's VLC.
Would def be interesting if someone could write up a history of the project so far. I wonder how much industry input into the OSS commits there are (like MS/IBM into linux, postgres, etc)