Bea with me whilst I attempt to use 3ivx to help explain the mpeg4 compatibility issues that are at the heart of my wafflings.
3ivx is software that can encode and decode mpeg4. Its encoder was considered to be quite a bit nicer than the Apple one that comes with quicktime, and so it was recommended here for quite some time. Because it could create completely compliant mpeg4 files, no special '3ivx' decoder was needed to watch such videos. What the viewing device needs is a mpeg4 decoder capable of playing back that spec mpeg4 that 3ivx could create. In practice this meant you could encode stuff using 3ivx, and people with quicktime 6 or 7 could watch it without needing to download anything extra, because quicktime 6 and 7 have an mpeg4 decoder. The devilish detail was that there were certain options in 3ivx, which if enabled, would create mpeg 4 that was of a higher quality, but used features that the mpeg4 decoder in quicktime didnt support, in which case people would need to download 3ivx codec, or use some other mpeg4 player/decoder that could handle the more advanced version of mpeg4. So people like Michael Verdi had to advise people of the right settings to use, when creating guides to this stuff, to make sure their videos would be compliant. Anyway 3ivx didnt update their stuff when quicktime 7 or intel macs came out, and meanwhile h264 gained some popularity as its mostly better quality than these older mpeg4 technollgies, although the difference isnt always large if a mpeg4 encoder is good enough (and 3ivx and divx are examples of this). So things started to break and 3ivx hasnt been hardly mentioned here in the last year compared to the first. I just went to their site and they 'launched' a new version in January, that works with QT7 and intel macs, but it still isnt actually available. I have no knowledge about the inner workings of their company but I was putoff 3ivx by a total lack of anything really happening for several years, but they did make a nice mpeg4 encoder compared to apples one. Anyway since then we have seen a similar story when the ipods came out, Apple included easy options that had some flaws, and when manually encoding mpeg4 and h264 for the ipod, care had to be taken to produce a certain sort that was compatible with (i guess) the decoder chip in the video ipods. Then apple change their spec and quicktime behaviour and things get confusing. Now the Apple TV will have support for a greater range of h264 mp4's, but still with some ceiling, parameters and profiles that arent supported, so care must still be taken. Sony's early mp4 and h264 adventures on the PSP had some very quirky things that meant although certain kinds of standard mpeg4 and h264 were supported, tiny change needed to be made to file wrapper to make it work, and filenames had to be a specific silly format. This has got better but Im not sure if its perfect yet and I dont know how quirky th PS3's mpeg4 & h264 support will be. So anyways the point is that .mp4 h264 and mpeg4 that I praise are not tied the special modifications of one company, and it can be very confusing finding out whether a product is able to work with mpeg4 and h264 in a compliant way, or whether it is based on these technologies but adds some proprietary stuff of its own that makes us reliant on a specific company to offer support in the future. Now DivX is about the least clear cut case I can think of on this, I need to learn much more about the mpeg4 video their stuff creates. It may be that their tools can be used to create completely compliant mpeg4, in which case Id be promoting showing the methods of how to do that. They have offered cross-compatibility with another library, and their stuff is supported in things like VLC via some mpeg4 and mp3 libraries not made by divx, I presume. They are an mpeg4 encoder. They offer the only alternative I know about to play mpeg4-like video in a browser, other than quicktime. So they have more in common with mpeg4 and the world I love than they have difference, but the differences are stilla hurdle. And as I said none of this would matter if every device manufacturer that makes their stuff handle mpeg4, also bothered to get divx certification at the same time and support the different wrapper. Clearly divx must be compatible with a range of hardware decoder chips as it works with so many devices already, I just cant predict how widespread divx support will be in mobile phones, and other mobile devices. One last way to say the same thing: If in the distant future divx had totally lost all its share, and everyone was just mpeg4 focussed, then divx could still compete by making a really great encoder that outputs totally standard sorts of mpeg4 and h264, give up on their file format and promote .mp4, and change their web browser plugin to work with .mp4's and whatever the standard audio format is. Its not reasonable to expect them to do such a thing now, so long as the path they're currently on seems to hold more interesting revenue potential than just being one of many encoders/decoders in the mpeg4 & h264 space, albeit with a rather sexy browser plugin. If I was a millionaire Id be throwing lots of money at someone to make a real quality mpeg4 & h264 browser plugin that comes built into firefox, or any other ways to get it out there to people. Theres now a heck of a lot of tools for encoding mpeg4 and h264, plenty of ways to watch them on mac and windows, and I assume linux, but still mostly reliant on apple to see them in the browser. No reason why that has to be the case, yet it perpetuates the idea for many windows users that .mp4 files are something to do with apple in a more proprietary way than is actually the case. I dont miss talking like this all the time on this list, in hindsight whoa how many times did I mention h264 in the first year or so? Ugh! Cheers Steve Elbows
