DivX 7 will be published, so DivX Inc. on January next year (2009).
The company realized early, the time for HD content is coming, and they also tried early hard to place their, still on MPEG4/AVS based compression decoder as the decoder for HD content, such as 1920x1080p.
The big advantage (I’ve got a few samples here) is, that this content plays fine on CPU around 2GHz, maybe less, for the prize of being twice in size as an MPEG4/AVC (aka H.264) encoded video.
But considering a file size of an well compressed 1080p x264 encoded movie, which usually is about 6 to 12GB in size, the AVS video would be 12 to 24GB. This of course matters.
We’re still living, regarding Linux, in a pre-hardaware-accelerated era. This is of course about to end (vdpau), but we’re still there. Windows left this era already two years ago with hardware acceleration such as PureVideo from Nvidia or an equivalent product from ATI or S3 (opencrome).
In the meantime CoreCodec perpormed well with its CoreAVC decoder for Windows and (not so long ago Linux), and managed to place a new cantainer format for HD content, called Matroska (.mkv).
Almost all available US serials are encoded in x264 and plays back fine (CoreAVC) on dual-core 2GHz systems. Even Mplayer can handle such content without major issues on systems with one core and around 2.5Ghz.
Now comes DivX Inc, with its DivX container and puts AVC/H.264) capabilities into into, hoping the extension .avi or .divx becomes as famous as in former times again. I’m not sure, but this gonna be a hard race, since CoreCodec with its CoreAVC and Matroska container, NVidia with its hardware acceleration called PureVideo, ATI, S3 and all the other are already here and kicking well. Even for encoding there exists hardware acceleration such as Badaboom (not for Linux yet).
I don’t personally see where DivX place should be in this scenario. Concurrency is not bad for all of us, but I don’t need DivX anymore, and doubt it’ll come back to old strength,beauty and pervasiveness again.
But I was often wrong regarding such statement. DivX – surprise me!
DivX has paid over $20 million dollars to acquire the rights to H.264, plus $6 million to Warner Bros. and $3 million to Sony for their commitment to distribute their content in the Divx format, so you can be assured that they will do whatever it takes to bring back their glory days.