Mpeg4

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CLIC HERE 4 DIVX MAC OS X

(makes QUIKTIME view AVI movies .....
dont have 2 use the seperate app....
which is great cuz i can preview AVIs n my browser now)
 
From this Ben Waggoner article
Available @ http://www.dv.com/magazine/2001/0501/waggoner0501.html
(VERY Interesting by the way)

DivX ;-)

This irritatingly named technology (the winking smiley face is actually part of the name!) has one of the most unbalanced heat/light ratios of any digital video topic I can remember. In essence, it's a hack that lets the MS MPEG-4 v3 codec be used inside an AVI file. It's often linked with both the DVD ripping subculture (where it seems to be the tool of choice, but not for any profound technical reason) and the Open Source movement (although it isn't Open Source, as it makes library calls to Microsoft code). And, of course, it's often referred to as MPEG-4, which it obviously isn't.

A number of otherwise-sensible Web sites have added a lot of confusion on this topic-don't be distracted by them, especially by the hideously erroneous #3 on the "Tom's Hardware Guide" article.


The article also talks about Sorenson and iVAST working for some kind of MPEG-4 encoding studio to be available soon for Mac Users... I like the fact that the MPEG-4 standard have adopted the QuickTime format instead of Microsoft prefered (but crappy) ASF format...

Microsoft thought that its Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) was going to be the file format for MPEG-4, so the company built its implementation of the draft spec codec in an ASF file inside Windows Media Player. Had ASF been the file format for MPEG-4, this would have been an interesting beta prerelease. However, the standard actually adopted QuickTime as its file format, so MS ASF files aren't MPEG-4 files. After MS MPEG-4 v3, the next version of the codec was renamed Windows Media Video v7 to avoid confusion with the real MPEG-4, and to bring the numbering into sync with the rest of the Windows Media architecture.
 
MPEG-4 is a rather complicated, inclusive standard for a number of technologies, not just simple video encoding. There is a huge effort going on now to ensure that files encoded by one companies codec will be playable by every other available codec. The good news is that it seems that MPEG-4 is being embraced by most of the corporate world. This means we will have a well defined, cross platform format for video and audio that is supported by most content providers.
 
Nice, nice nice... good to see that people are working to make a multi-codec scheme reliable. Also good to see that people are working to clean up the FUD many people have created with DivX ;-), which in my opinion can be one of the best, or worst low-bitrate codecs around. I personally like H.261 which is not entirely dependant on the size of the image for the bitrate, and floats around DivX ;-) in bitrate when properly configured. The only problem I have is when going from DivX ;-) to H.261, all the noise blocks are more visible and everything is a little fuzzy... still can't have our cake and eat it too for older machines yet. DivX ;-) is too CPU intensive, Sorenson is iffy at times when using VBR, H.261 is too fuzzy at higher resolutions... what else is there that I could try?
 
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