DivX 5.1 is out:
http://www.divx.com/divx/

whohey!!
let the testing begin!

let's see if it can outake 5.5 (although it looks quite promising. motion estamination should be better, at least what I gatherd from the beta reviews).

No announce at the news section yet though...

edit1: but who cares, you can already download it. let's just hope that there isn't a bug they didnt't find, like the quick 5.5 release after 5.4...
gonna do my first 5.1 movie now B)
edit2: whole divx page updated, news section there.

thx for the news!!

Thanks for the info

i played around with the new divx a bit and must say that it has become goddamn slow. now i'm changing 100% over to xvid ;-)

edit: i tested non-pro version and image quality is subjective lower than xvid's quality

I'm holding my breath for the 1.0 of Xvid. In the meantime I'll try the goddam slow (and getting slower) divx5.1. Anyone notice how bad ffdshow works with the last couple of releases?


mobius

i have not enough patience for 1.) divx 5.1 to finish encoding and 2.) xvid 1.0 to be released.
i get along good enough with the latest unstable xvid build from koepi

So does DivX 5.1 actually worsen avi playback quality?

I have version 5.05 installed + ffdshow.
Am I better off not installing version 5.1?

well, officially, 5.1 should have a faster and more relieable decoder. but some users experienced choppy playback on older machines (where they claim that even there is a 10 % boost in performance).
I never had any real problems though, tried it on my own computer (quite fast ) and also on my sister's one, which is an athlon 500.
the only thing that make me thinking about not installing 5.1 is, there where some (rare) sycronisation-issues, which I didn't had that 'often' before under 5.5.
but as I only watched two movies so far, and the issue might aswell have been cauesed by something else, it's hard to tell.
at least I didn't experienced heavy or even light choppiness.

why don't you just check it out and see for yourself?

For people complaining about speed there are a couple things you can do about this without reducing quality too much. For example you can do a three pass encode like this:
first pass:
PQ standard with MV
second pass:
PQ standard, PVE fast with MV
third pass:
PQ slowest, PVE fast and NO MV and don't update the log file
Doing it this way the first and second pass will be quite fast and only the last pass will be the slowest. Keep in mind that once you change performance/quality you may no longer reuse the motion vectors. Oh, and about ffdshow, probably the reason it looks bad is because you are using the wrong IDCT to decode it. DivX and XviD both use Walken IDCT and ffmpeg uses simple IDCT, by default ffdshow uses simple. So set the IDCT to XviD and the performance should be much better for both DivX and XviD.

This release seems a bit disappointing. Sometimes the picture flickers a bit with blockiness. Never had that problem before with 5.0.5. Also, the playback doesnt seem smooth at all (on a P4 2.4 GHz).

Looks like I might stick with 5.0.5 until they fix up this mess.

encoding slow as hell here, it is like 4 fps even with standard settings... (aborting)

I find that turning off that feedback window speeds it up heaps. Click the settings button in the encoder window and choose disable feedback window.

yes, did that allready, also turning off psy-visual stuff and i get about 6-7 fps avearge
(i guess i need a new comp...)
edit: xvid stable gives me around 11fps, i guess it is just a complicated project (got some deinterlacing stuff as well)

Just curious. What program are you using to encode video?

virtualdub, (served via avs).

i'm using virtualdubmod and gordianknot

Ah cool. I use virtualdubmod in general and FlaskMPEG for backing up my DVDs. I've read lots of times about people complaining just how damn slow FlaskMPEG is but I did a test. I encoded a DVD in FlaskMPEG using DivX 5.1 and it did it at around 10 fps. I did the same segment using DivX 5.1 in virtualdubmod and it was around 10 fps as well. So I assume the latest FlaskMPEG is more optimised now.

Very good release from DXN, I think DivX Labs has shown it's worth. The slowest mode shows a good increase in quality over 5.0.5 and if that's too slow for you the standard mode has the speed and also a slight improvement in quality. Standard in 5.1 is basically the same as Slowest in 5.0.5 but with some of the general improvements like the improvements with b-frames.
The new PVE seems to be good as well and has no noticeable side-effects that I've seen so far.

speed depends on how you serve/resize the video to the encoding app, build in vdub or vdubmod filters are slower that avs ones since they operate in rgb mode afaik. (not sure about vdubmod)

For those who've had experience using DivX (I'm just an amateur), is it worth turning on the psychoacoustic thingy and the pre-processing source?

Also, I noticed that the difference between DivX and DivX Pro is the pre-processing source and bidirectional encoding. Are these two features worth having Gator installed (and blocked by my firewall? )

I'm not an expert myself, but: yes. psychovisual enhancements are well worth it. you might want to set it to normal for 1 cd movies.


no harm done if gator stays quiet via a firwall. pro-version is much recommended.

PE would give a water effect which could be very annoying on some encodes so was not much good for 2CD rips & for 1CD was even worse in 5.02 I haven't tried 5.1.

why not just give xvid a try? u get the same features 100% free

realy? I thought it was generally approved to use it, for 1cd at normal and for2cd at light... never experienced any water effects (at least with 5.05, can't remember with 5.02). my main problem have always been blocks (though I guess this is not due to pe ).

...and also gives you quite good quallity. but everybody gotta make a choise sometimes, some stick to divx, some to xvid, some to...

btw, mplayer was just recently ported from *nix to win, some bin files can be found @:
http://ftp.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/
http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php
(upx compressed)

PVE is safe now, they completely redid the way that they are doing it. But don't use it on high bitrate movies only on low bitrate 1 CD rips.

from what i did (just one rip) it looks watery, but it was kinda really-low-bitrate thingy (i used fast setting).

anyway, 5.1.1 beta 1 is out:
http://labs.divx.com/archives/000020.html

Thank God 5.1.1 is faster!

With DivX 5.1 on my PIII-733, it was taking me a full 24 hours to do two-pass movie encodings.

TMPGEnc 'Soften Block Noise' feature seems to be better than 'Pre-processing' built in DivX..
Anyone knows a filter in Virtual Dub which is similar to 'Soften Block Noise'?

Erm... real encoding people use avisynth and its large pool of filters.

Don't use virtualdub or tmpg filters. The best thing to do is use avisynth filters. That way you don't have to do colour space conversions (at least not most of the time) In general, the avisynth filter are much more advanced than anything else out there. Here is a link to a collection of filters, http://www.avisynth.org/~warpenterprises and you will need to have avisynth 2.5 installed. And a decent knowledge of the scripting is helpful. It isn't too hard, just take a look at a example script from like gordainknot and you should be on your way.

IMO PE is not so good in use. For example, if you set quantizer=1 and then through tracking window during encoding see the diference between input and output, the picture will be almost grey (diff draws zero), and if you do the same + PE on - traced contours become visible. If you increase quantizer, effect increases also.