>> And DivX, as you read before is a new encoding format brought out by the
>> MPEG industry...its actually called MPEG-4....but of course, Bill and
>> his henchman modified it, and its propietary now, and we NEED to have
>> WMP 6.3 on our systems to use it. The Mac DivX player is a totally
>> seperate entity...just like Quicktime Player...but everytime you load it
>> up, it looks for WinMedia Player 6.3....what kind of BS is that??? MS at
>> its finest.
>
> I think I read in the DivX;-) faq that this codec was hacked from an MS
> one and MS does NOT support it. In fact, I believe that MS actually
> revised the Media Player to break support for it. That's why you have to
> use the old Media Player. I think MPEG-4 is based on the Sorenson codec,
> but I'm no expert.
Just to keep this straight. . .what happened was MPEG-4, which is an open
industry standard, was co-opted by Microsoft for their Windows Media video
format (.asf I think) and, as typical, was modified just enough that it is
now a closed proprietary format. DivX is a hack of the Windows Media codec
that lets one use it to encode in AVI format, and still enjoy the massive
compression and playback advantages of MPEG-4. Thus the subject of the
original post. . .AVI. . .you would normally probably try and playback an
AVI with Quicktime Player, and this would be reasonable because most of the
common codecs are cross-platform and openly available and included in
Quicktime. But the Microsoft codec (that DivX is based on) is closed and
proprietary, and therefore cannot be included in Quicktime, or any other
commercial product for that matter. That's why you need Windows Media
Player installed to play DivX.
I might add that this is a %$#@ing blatant example of product bundling and
abuse of monopoly power in the streaming media market. They are doing to
Real Media exactly what they did to Netscape. Squeeze them out of the
client market by bundling the player with Windows then dominate the server
market (where Real/Netscape actually makes money) based on the installed
client base. Same thing applies to their instant messenger client.
-Greg
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