Today we are releasing through the DivX Labs website exciting new DivX technologies and products including:


* DivX Fusion Player
* DivX Fusion Codec update
* DivX Fusion SDK
* DivX Media Format sample files


The DivX Media Format is the beginning of a new era of DivX video. Visit DivX Labs today for access to demo content and creation tools.

Note: this is a beta release, so kick the tires and let us know what you think.

thekid...

Why oh why an extension to a dying container. You guys in the US should know the Indian saying about the dying horse, and what to do with it, better than us in the old world .....

Is *.divx a new container? Or just the same avi but with renamed extension?

its an extension to AVI

Doom9 thread

the main movie and the audio streams are compliant to .avi
an .avi player will ignore the new stuff, like menus and subtitles, tough

its definitely not a new container developed from scratch, but avi extended with menus (defacto multiple video streams) and subtitles

Thanks for this answer.
It's an understandable choice. Old device are still compatible with new encodings, and new one access to new features.

Choosing a new container (like MP4, MKV...) probably allows more features, but also had a reverse side (breaking the compatibility with millions DVD players).

New Encodings are only going to be compatible with the DivX Player though (unless they open up the spec). They should have gone with an exisiting standard like MPEG4, which can support menus, subtitles, multiple audio tracks, etc (although I'm not sure all of those are standard features, but it can, and has, been done)

indeed, from my point of view it makes perfectly sense for dxn to stay with .avi and extend it to their needs


all you listed is standardised in mpeg-4

alexnoe tested the new DivX N stuff, and it doesnt play on any known AVI player, also not in WMP. So where is the backwards compatibility ?

Either I or ChristianHJW is suffering from Alzheimer, and i'm pretty sure i'm not....

EDIT: I have said that this stuff can't play on anything, but I haven't tested anything either. It just can't play because those files are intentionally b0rked AVI files (chunk IDs changed etc, to intentionally prevent them from working on common AVI splitters)

this proves it too;
http://forums.divx.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=7...651&m=144101732

although DigitAl56K's answer should go
"Some changes were made _to break_ backwards compatibility. This is intentional"

heh...

there was .divx extension waay back (also in connection to player...'the playa'...i think divx version 4.something if i remember...).

i'm wondering what's making divx think it will fly this time?
also, doesn't this require a change of firmware on standalone divx players?


oh well..when you can't do much more with the codec itself, you wan't to add something.
i guess this is it.

... hard words to an old man ...



Right. I read up the IRC logs, the test weren't made by alexnoe but by StephanV. Still, the result is the same, those new DivX N files wont play on anything but their players ....

Christian

Read better in your logs. I only said the second segment, the HD portion, which i extracted with a hex editor, didnt work. As alexnoe said it has backwards chunk IDs which no AVI parser should have to handle. Currently Haali's splitter does though, because he has added support for 1idx and it ignores chunk IDs anyway (therefor Haali's splitter won't work with files that don't have an index.)

I fixed the second segment with my hex editor (find and replace) after which it played fine. I already asked DivX why they did this, and they say they did it to keep backwards compatibility with exisitng AVI parsers, which is complete BS:. I also changed the chunk IDs in the oroginal file which changed exactly nothing in the way it was played back by the players I tested.

The files play in WMP with the normal MS AVI splitter. It recognises the multiple audio stream and ignores the menus and subtitles. It also works in mplayer and Haali's splitter can even recognise the 2nd segment. It does NOT work with VLC (crashes) and gabest's AVI splitter (doesnt think its an AVI).

AVIMux GUI crashed once when trying to remux the AVI (although i have to find out what exactly causes it) and VirtualDub gives a bunch of funny errors about the subtitle streams since dwRate and dwScale are set to 0 for those streams, which causes a devision by 0 (live at VDub forums will be interesting again sometime soon i guess...)

So right now support for this is rather thin... and backwards compatibility, what does that mean anyway?

my findings are:
the main movie and the audio streams work with the default windows .avi splitter (which propably as good as all users use for .avi playback), i get no errors

vd also handles it (but gives wrong framerate errors for the subtitle streams, which it obviously cant handle)

Seems i really completely missed the point of the discussion that day .... i am getting old ....