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Media Software

DivX 7 Adds Support For Blu-ray Rips (H.264/MKV) 294

Posted by timothy from the matroska-navratilova dept.
mrspin writes "DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content, with the company announcing that version 7 adds support for H.264 video and, more significantly, the Matroska (MKV) container. Anybody familiar with Blu-ray rips found on BitTorrent sites or other filesharing networks will instantly recognize the MKV file format in combination with the H.264 codec as a popular way to deliver High Definition video on a PC. And now that DivX is throwing its weight behind the Matroska container, MKV support should increasingly find its way on a range of non-PC devices, such as Blu-ray players, HD digital televisions and set-top boxes."
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DivX 7 Adds Support For Blu-ray Rips (H.264/MKV) More

DivX 7 Adds Support For Blu-ray Rips (H.264/MKV)

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  • H.264/HE-AAC support in Flash Player 9 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohnNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:48AM (#26432941) Journal
    While it wasn't mentioned in the article, it was mentioned in one of the many articles that it links to but DivX is facing Adobe in the marketshare for being the predominant technology streaming H.264 [adobe.com]. I believe this is Flash being used as a container to stream H.264 instead of the Matroska container.

    And now that DivX is throwing its weight behind the Matroska container, MKV support should increasingly find its way on a range of non-PC devices, such as Blu-ray players, HD digital televisions and set-top boxes.

    I don't know man, I think both DivX & Adobe have hidden costs even if both like you to view them as "open." I would put my money on Adobe coming through with better player/container support & marketing. On top of that, I don't know of any plans for DRM in Matroska.

    So while this is great news for the people who want to put their home videos out there with software that doesn't support DRM (is the average user really going to care though?), I think that the MPAA & porn industry are going to be the deciders here (as they usually are).

    My prediction: Flash 9 will become so pervasive that everyone will use that as a container instead of asking their users to download & install a DivX codec.

    • Re:H.264/HE-AAC support in Flash Player 9 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:06AM (#26433209)

      I don't understand why you think DivX won't succeed. For years no-name DVD players have almost all supported DivX, and now even my Pioneer unit is DivX 6 certified. It doesn't seem like a stretch that they will support 7.

      Personally, I love having 3 or 4 DVDs on a single disk for traveling. Since my portable player supports DivX, I can fit more than a whole season of Dora on a single disk and keep the little one quiet on long trips.

    • Re:H.264/HE-AAC support in Flash Player 9 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:36AM (#26433721)
      Unless Adobe majorly changes direction wrt supporting non x86 platforms it WILL lose the race. More and more people are consuming content on non-PC platforms and people are starting to not care that their device doesn't support flash, they are starting to demand that content providers offer an alternate container. A prime example is Google with youtube which now streams standard x.264 which while originally meant for iPhone support is being used more and more for all sorts of devices (I use it on my BB).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is old news, and you're misrepresenting it. The Flash player supports H.264 in the standard MP4 container, not only in the old FLV container. In fact it seems like FLV is being phased out. So, surprisingly, Flash has become the leader in standardization of video formats. AVC/AAC is likely to become a new de-facto standard, whether in Matroska or MP4 containers. Container formats don't matter much. It's very easy and fast to remux something into another container if the stream formats are supported.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PhillC ( 84728 )

        The Flash player supports H.264 in the standard MP4 container, not only in the old FLV container.

        And in a MOV container.

    • Re:H.264/HE-AAC support in Flash Player 9 (Score:4, Informative)

      by Hurricane78 ( 562437 ) <deleted&slashdot,org> on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @12:30PM (#26435789)

      FLV was never a streaming container in the first place. In fact, being nothing more than a unmanaged HTTP download that you watch while it still loads, it's a very crappy way of "streaming" data. I can do that with most formats, by downloading them to the disk, and then playing them in my favorite media player. I did this with MP3s since 1999.

      I did not even have to re-download it, every time I wanted to play it.

      FLV can't even come close to MKV in things of media containers. MKV supports multiple streams of video, audio, subtitles, or in fact anything that you can think of (eg a stream for some special effects device), stream tags, timecodes, cues, stereoscopy, stretching/compressing, attachments (eg cover, background information, reviews), segment linking and chapters. Oh, and of course, because it's EBML, you can add your own "tags" and functionality as you like, without affecting the compatibility to old programs. And it's made for very flexible streaming.

  • I don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hatta ( 162192 )

    How is DivX, a video codec, going to support H.264, another video codec. If a video is in divx, then it's not in H.264, and vice versa. And you can already put a divx encoded video stream into an .mkv container. So what is new here?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by darkvad0r ( 1331303 )
      From TFA: "The new DivX Plus HD format, which enables the creation and playback of H.264 video in an .mkv file container with high-quality AAC audio" So I'm guessing it's their implementation of H.264 but my guess is as good as yours ...

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by yuna49 ( 905461 )

        Fansubbed anime has been distributed as 720p/H.264/AAC in the Matroska container for at least a few years now. In fact, this is now the pretty much the standard format for most fansubs. So now that a commercial entity is doing the same thing it's somehow news?

    • Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Informative)

      by Milvuss ( 1417689 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:58AM (#26433091)

      That's simple : DivX is a video software, not a video format. It always has been. DivX 4-6 is based on one standard format : MPEG-4 Part 2 (aka MPEG-4 Visual, aka MPEG-4 ASP). So they are just updating their software to support the latest standard format, H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10, aka MPEG-4 AVC).

      The equation video codec = video format is just a bad habit, and most of the time false today with proprietary things like Indeo ou RealVideo less and less used.

      • That's simple : DivX is a video software, not a video format. It always has been. DivX 4-6 is based on one standard format : MPEG-4 Part 2 (aka MPEG-4 Visual, aka MPEG-4 ASP). So they are just updating their software to support the latest standard format, H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10, aka MPEG-4 AVC).

        The question should be which container are the using. If they are using the AVI container then I have to ask why? Surely the MPEG4 container is doing the job just fine? When Divx first came out I could understand

  • So, remind me again... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mr_da3m0n ( 887821 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:52AM (#26432995) Homepage

    Remind me again, how does Matroska + H.264 automagically equals "Blu-ray Rips" and piracy in general?

    Isn't that a bit like saying that Bittorrent automatically equals pirated software?

    • Re:So, remind me again... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:57AM (#26433077)

      H.264 gives unequalled compression on CP and terrorist training videos.
      I'm not sure about the technical reasons behind this.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Schiphol ( 1168667 )
      The note only says that if you are familiar with Blue-ray rips found on BitTorrent sites you will instantly recognise Matroska + H.264. No "automatic equality" is involved in this (largely correct) claim, that I see.

      And, yes, anyone familiar with BitTorrent will instantly recognise pirated software -some prefer to talk of software being shared, what with no pirates being involved in the activity.

    • Re:So, remind me again... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Goaway ( 82658 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @11:19AM (#26434473) Homepage

      Sure, technically it doesn't equal that.

      But really, that particular argument would carry more weight if there existed any MKV+h.264 files that weren't pirated. I can't recall ever seeing one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )
      The majority of traffic over bittorrent is pirated software/tv shows/music/movies.

  • DivX (the codec) is irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tack ( 4642 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:52AM (#26433005) Homepage
    It's nice to see DivX (the company) back Matroska, but does anyone really use DivX (the codec) anymore? Their ASP codec is consistently inferior to Xvid, and so my faith that they will be able to develop a new AVC codec that bests x264 is not terribly strong.

    • Obviously I've been asleep a while. I wasn't aware that DivX acquired MainConcept [divx.com].

      Well, MainConcept isn't horrible, but it still lags behind x264. It's to x264 what DivX is to Xvid. (Let the flaming begin!)

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Stavr0 ( 35032 )

      It's nice to see DivX (the company) back Matroska, but does anyone really use DivX (the codec) anymore?

      Yes they do! It's what gets implemented in the firmware of all those DivX(TM) certified DVD players. It's why the XVID codec must be tuned to produce a 'player compatible' file. There's still a lot of DivX enabled players who are limited to 720x480 playback. Hopefully, this will break the HD barrier for user generated content.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 )

      It's nice to see DivX (the company) back Matroska, but does anyone really use DivX (the codec) anymore? Their ASP codec is consistently inferior to Xvid, and so my faith that they will be able to develop a new AVC codec that bests x264 is not terribly strong.

      Yes, people still use Divx. Go to the alt.* groups on Usenet to see how many. I watch a foreign TV that is unavailable in the USA and I watch it via Divx encodes that people who live in the broadcast country make and place on Usenet.

      As far as "inferiority" to Xvid goes, that was true years ago, but today I doubt that you'd be able to tell any difference between Xvid encoded material and stuff correctly encoded with the commerical Divx codec.

  • DivX? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:53AM (#26433015)

    Xvid seems to have taken over as the 'gray area' encoder of choice from what I've seen.

    And do people still pay much attention to the actual "DiVX" people? Even when I used Divx it was all mplayer/mencoder, ffmpeg, vlc, etc.

    • And do people still pay much attention to the actual "DiVX" people?

      As the article states, I think it can be of some importance for hardware devices.

  • Grey area (Score:4, Insightful)

    by papasui ( 567265 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @09:54AM (#26433031) Homepage
    I hate comments like this, they make a rather popular codec. It's not popular because of piracy, it's popular because it works well. It's like blamming the MP3 format for music piracy, before that it was casettes. If DivX/Xvid/Mp3 wasn't around piracy would exist in another format.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )

      If it's popular because it's good, why is it still mostly used for piracy rather than other things?

      Let me rephrase that: What it is used for other than piracy?

      I have seen a couple really low-budget games that use it. (And both the game and video was shitty quality.) Some (really high-tech) people send their personal videos in it. I've not seen -anything- else use it.

      So their comments are spot-on. It is what people use it for, and it got popular because people use it for that.

      • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

        by Koiu Lpoi ( 632570 )
        What do games even use for their video codecs these days? I can't even remember the last time I saw an in-game video, and I'm certain it was Bink. When, excatly, was the consumer able to use Bink for anything? Never? Naturally, they'll be using the best thing they can. Just because Piracy happens to use it also doesn't mean it's popular BECAUSE of piracy.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Aladrin ( 926209 )

          No, it's popular because of piracy because piracy made it popular. I'm not using logic to say it's popular because of piracy. I'm using history.

        • Did you play BioShock last year? That had a fair amount of pre-rendered video. The thing is that they actually blended it in pretty well. It wasn't until I was done playing and I wanted to watch the other endings that I realized just how many scenes were pre-rendered instead of rendered on-the-fly.
        • In reply to you and your parent post:

          The reasons that it's not used for much else other than piracy, even though it has superior compression, is because most vendors want to lock you into a format. Microsoft would never use it because they have WMV, which has been around for a while and they don't want to ditch it. Apple also has their own proprietary formats, and as the article says, there is no DRM support for the format at the moment. Long story short: All the companies that would "make it popular" ha

    • DivX is the best format to use for archiving TV shows you've recorded. It will usually half to third the size of a one hour show and the quality reduction isn't very noticeable(as in, the lady doesn't notice). It is a native format of the media extender [hauppauge.com] and its bigger, high-def brother [sagetv.com].

      However, I do have to somewhat agree with you about both DivX and Mp3 getting their roots in piracy. I distinctly remember the first time I heard one of those new fangled mp3's in like 1997. Sneaker Pimps 6 Underground.

    • It didn't say that it was popular because of piracy, but only that it was "the video format of choice for 'grey' content", i.e. that it's popular among pirates. There's a difference.

      I will say, however, that I don't see DivX being used frequently for legitimate commercial purposes. Maybe I'm missing something. But even if that's the case-- that it's popular among pirates and no one else-- then to me the interesting question is "why is it popular among pirates?" I would think that there'd be some other

  • Come on, was the piracy spin really needed? Youtube uses them, DVD/Bluray players use them, MP3 players use them, heck Windows 7 is even including DivX, H.264 (though not sure if it's through the new DivX codec), and AAC support now. Hate to break it to you, but these codecs are used for a lot more things other than copyright infringement.

    • Downloading isn't even illegal... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Langfat ( 953252 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:05AM (#26433205) Homepage
      I know that Slashdot is US-centric, but it should be pointed out that in many other countries it is not illegal to download a copy of content that you already legally own.

      I can't be bothered to learn how to properly rip HD content from a blu-ray when there are already experts who can do/have done it for me.
      • Indeed. It's always faster for me to grab an xvid copy of a movie from newsgroups I own on dvd than to rip it myself. Same with music. And like you said, they probably did a better job than me. Trying to understand what deinterlacing method to use gives me a headache.

      • I can't be bothered to learn how to properly rip HD content from a blu-ray when there are already experts who can do/have done it for me.

        Spot on.

        I used to love to tinker. I loved finding that shining program (usually not so shining, usually more like a command line with 15 parameters) that would take my CD/DVD/whatnot and pull the data off it and categorize it into my file library.

        But as I move out of the college lifestyle, where I had time to do that sort of thing, I just don't have the time anymore to find the program, tweak it just right, tailor it for each movie/cd/whatever, and get the perfect rip.

        I can go online, find someone who has

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheThiefMaster ( 992038 )

        Using P2P is a different story of course, because you upload to anyone who asks, not just people who you've verified owns the original.

        It's the uploading, not the downloading, which is technically illegal.

      • It is not illegal to download content at all!
        What is breaking a contract, is to actually give (offering is not enough) content to others (implicitly with no license), when the license under which you got it does not allow this.

        And even if this happens, you still have to clarify how to handle that breach of contract. Only if you refuse to come to terms with the other party, you will end up in court. And then it's not only up to them to define what you have to do, to make that breach Ok. It's just as much up

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )

      None of those use MKV.

  • While DivX is hardly the codec of choice for encoding MPEG-4 ASP for sharing online in .avi files, it has created a recognisable symbol and set of guidelines for various boxes, from DVD players to PVRs to games consoles, to make use of and to show they support this format. If this development means that new boxes like these add support for the Matroska container and H.264 as part of getting to put that little 'DivX Certified' logo on the front, then maybe that does actually mean something.

  • What Gray Content? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:23AM (#26433505) Homepage

    DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content,

    Not sure what gray content you are referring to. I'm assuming this is about legal shades of gray, but there aren't any in terms of content (or at least not the ones you are probably talking about):

    There is exactly nothing illegal about making copies of your own discs for personal use.

    There is a law against distributing ripping software (the DMCA), but it doesn't sound like you're talking about that.

    There is a law about distributing the content itself, but that isn't gray - it's illegal.

    The only gray areas are content used for criticism and education.

    'course - entirely possible I've misunderstood what "grey" is supposed to mean - maybe a hipster term for re-encoding or something.

    • "Gray Market" traditionally doesn't imply "illegal", but rather "unapproved". If you buy a product overseas because the manufacturer doesn't want to sell it in the US (yet) or or want to charge more in the US, that's "gray market". Some people use the term to refer to any mechanism for any mechanism for bypassing restrictions manufacturers restrictions, others limit it to imports.

    • Re:What Gray Content? (Score:4, Informative)

      by kelnos ( 564113 ) <bjt23@cornel[ ]du ['l.e' in gap]> on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @12:33PM (#26435849) Homepage

      There is exactly nothing illegal about making copies of your own discs for personal use.

      In the US, at least, the DMCA would beg to differ with that interpretation, for media protected by an anti-circumvention device. That would be pretty much anything relevant today aside from audio CDs.

  • MKVs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DurendalMac ( 736637 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:24AM (#26433533)
    What I don't get about MKVs is that they take so much bloody horsepower, even in SD. I have a 1.5ghz Mac Mini I use as an HTPC. I've been able to play 480p and even some 720p HD on it with very few issues. However, I got a few SD MKVs. Both would stutter and choke on it. What the hell? Either VLC and MPlayer are very poorly optimized in MKV playback or that codec requires a ludicrous amount of horsepower to run. Quicktime with Perian managed to run it, but it appears there's a bug in Perian which will make the movie run at double speed while the audio remains the same if you watch it long enough. What's the deal? I've played back plenty of standard H.264 files just fine. What makes MKV so special?

    • Confusion... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      MKV is a container format. It's not impossible for a container format to induce overhead, but in all likelihood that isn't the case.

      The codec would be something like h264,xvid,indeo,theora,etc for video, aac, mp3,vorbis,wav,etc.

      I don't know about Quicktime, but avi is horribly limited. Ogg seemed to have promise for a container format, but for whatever reason MKV came about with support for some killer features menus and vobsub format subtitle tracks. I have never seen an mkv with menu, but I have heard

      • Codec vs Container (Score:5, Interesting)

        by coryking ( 104614 ) * on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @11:38AM (#26434837) Homepage Journal

        Took a while for that distinction to sink in. Here is another container format you'll be hearing about a lot more in the coming months. QAM [wikipedia.org] and ATSC [wikipedia.org]. QAM is only a signal modulation and can be used to stream any kind of container format--usually some variant of ATSC. Think of it, I guess, as like the low-level ethernet stuff--ethernet doesn't care if you use TCP/IP or IPX/SPX. ATSC is kind of like TCP/IP or IPX/SPX, it defines how information is sent over the low-level stuff, but for the most part it doesn't care what the information is (MPEG2, H.264). ATSC typically only carries MPEG2, but I guess it has been updated to carry H.264/MPEG4. I guess it can only carry AC-3 audio streams and not mp3.

        If you really want to force yourself to learn about video and audio codecs and containers, force yourself to use ffmpeg on the command line for a while. It's docs and number of switches can seem daunting at first, but just remember what you are trying to do is tell it what codecs to use, what bitrates to use, and any modification to the video/audio stream (aspect ratio, resolution, framerate, etc). If you type "ffmpeg -formats | less", you'll get a list of what your version of ffmpeg can read and what containers and codecs it can write to. Keep in mind not every container can hold all the codecs; you'll have to consult wikipedia for that. The whole exercise will make you think about every aspect of your transcoding experience.

        PS: is it me or does chrome have a horrible spellchecker?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by pete-classic ( 75983 )

          QAM is not a container format. It is a modulation scheme (as implied by the name).

          A QAM (in the video world) normally carries an MPEG Transport Stream, which is sort of like a container, except that it's a sequential stream. But the MPEG TS does carry a mux of video, audio, and data such as subtitles, so it would be more analogous to a container format than QAM in this context. And, in fact, there is a container format that is a direct sibling to the MPEG TS, the MPEG Program Stream, which is the "contai

  • This makes no sense.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ConallB ( 876297 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:35AM (#26433707)

    DivX makes an announcement that thier DivX player can now support a format that even Media Player Classic can play with an open source codec?

    First off, MKV is a container which can add features to an encoded video stream such as chapters, subtitles, additional audio streams etc.

    The corresponding DivX container (Introduced with DivX6) is far inferior with its limited support for audio codecs and its insistence on DivX video encoding profiles.

    DivX the codec is simply a MP4 based video/audio encoder.

    You can wrap virtually any video or audio format in an MKV container and it should work just fine. I see no reason why DivX encoded movies could not be wrpped in an MKV container!

    I have never tried to encode DivX into an MKV container for several reasons:

    1. DivX is not the best MP4 Codec out there, XviD is better and freely availiable (It is a fork of the original OpenDivX).
    2. DivX started bundling thier codecs with all sorts of crapware some time ago which really tuned me off the codec.
    3. x264 is already availiable for high definition encoding.
    4. DivX encoding will cost you money with the Pro version.
    5. It is bloatware.

    Basically DivX are trying to make money by charging inexperienced users for functionality that is already freely availiable.

    If you want to watch virtually every availiable format without problems with a choice of video players I suggest the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net/).

    Or you can go ahead and pay the ignorance tax that is DivX.

  • Why is Matroska used? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Telvin_3d ( 855514 ) on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:50AM (#26433953)

    Somewhat tangential, but can someone explain why Matroska is the favorite container for ripped H.264 video? While I can appreciate that it is the 'open' alternative to the other formats it does not have significant technical advantages. However, open source ideology doesn't usually trump practical concerns in the ripping communities. Many devices and programs commonly used with ripped video, like media servers, media extenders, portable media players and many software players deal poorly with .mkv files. So why the heavy bias for .mkv as a container format instead of something like .mp4?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Somewhat tangential, but can someone explain why Matroska is the favorite container for ripped H.264 video? While I can appreciate that it is the 'open' alternative to the other formats it does not have significant technical advantages.

      The short answer is that AVI does not have proper support for the b-pyramids in H.264. You can put H.264 into AVI but this involves putting the b-frames into the same packets at the i-frames and this causes the timecodes and seeking to get messed up. Additionally AVI only a

    • The problem has to do with the intricacies of variable bit rate (VBR) codecs and the way that audio and video are interleaved.

      AVI and MOV only support very limited types of VBR and limited ways of interleaving audio with video. The result is that trying to put both H.264 video and AC3 or DTS audio in an AVI/MOV just doesn't work.

      Most professional, standardized formats like DVD/Bluray/broadcast/etc. use MPEG-2 transport streams to tie together multiple streams like this. M2T works great when it works, but

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lord Apathy ( 584315 )

      Because it's simply the best out there for it. It support just about everything you can mux into it. AVI just don't cut it any more. MP4 was close and it is a good container but it left one important thing out. In a bout of stupidity rivaling the bay of pigs and the bush election the audio codec of choice for dvd, ac3, was left out of the spec. That's right. The standard audio format can't be used in mp4.

      Now to be fair you can mux ac3 in a mp4 container using what is called user tracks or streams,

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by athakur999 ( 44340 )

      AVI seems to have alot more overhead than MKV. There is a utility to convert AVI files to MKV files and I noticed the resulting file was often a a megabyte or two smaller than the original AVI file. When you're targeting a storage medium with a relatively limited amount of space (e.g. DVDs, MP3 players, etc.) I suppose it could help fit a bit more content on there.

      I noticed occasionally I'd have audio sync problems on the converted files though so I stopped doing it since a few megabytes here and there do

    • Re:Why is Matroska used? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sancho ( 17056 ) * on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @11:46AM (#26434999) Homepage

      I don't know why it's currently a favorite, but like ZFS, the goal for Matroska is for it to be the end-all be-all of container formats. They eventually want to be able to have DVD-like menu systems, for example. How sweet would it be to be able to rip your DVD (including menus and special features?)

      Matroska also supports an unlimited number of tracks. That's pretty neat, though I don't know if anyone's doing much with that.

      As I noted in another post, it even allows for variable frame-rate (VFR) encodings, meaning that the frame-rate can change in the middle of the video stream. This addresses a common problem with encoding DVD rips from sources with mixed content.

      Most modern television is filmed at 24fps (really 23.976). The film is then sometimes telecined to 30fps (really 29.97) to display on interlaced NTSC TVs. A goal for encoding is to reduce filesize--so if you can recover the 24fps video from the 30fps "source" (from a capture card or from a telecined DVD) then you can encode only 24fps instead of 30fps. In addition, you don't have interlacing in your output. The recovery process is called inverse telecine (IVTC.)

      The problem comes when producers draw on the video. Special effects may be created at a different frame rate than the filmed scenes. IVTC will be unable to recover if the animation is at 30fps. You'll get awful-looking animated shots. Alternatively, you can try deinterlacing instead of IVTC, but then you get awful-looking motion in the non-animated segments.

      Enter Matroska. Now you can IVTC when appropriate, deinterlace when appropriate, and simply keep the source frame-rate when appropriate. You get the best of all worlds, and all because you can store VFR video streams.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by darkmeridian ( 119044 )

        Matroska also has less overhead, plays damaged files better than AVI, has better audio/video sync, streams better, supports more codecs, and you can skip to points better.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tibman ( 623933 )

      I'd say one of the big reasons is a hardware box doesn't need a license from Divx or anyone else to implement MKV.

      Quoted from wikipedia: "The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free Container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file.[1] It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in conception to other containers like AVI, MP4 or

  • An open letter to the powers-that-be (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pvera ( 250260 ) <pedro.vera@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:52AM (#26434003) Homepage Journal

    ... or at least the ones that handle the media that can be read by the Xbox 360.

    Please add MKV support to the Xbox 360. Don't touch anything else.

    Thanks!

  • Does that mean that Sony will soon provide DivX 7 support on the PS3 and PSP? I wrote about the potential here - http://lodge.glasgownet.com/2008/12/29/ps3-and-matroska-could-be-soon/ [glasgownet.com]

    Could we soon be streaming MKV files over the network to it, or playing them directly, with no transcoding?

  • ... to show, how ridiculous their DivX "format" is. What is DivX? It was an encoder for an old version of MPEG4. (Like XviD, 3ivX, and many others.)
    Now it's an encoder for H.264? Well, we already have x264 for that, and it work great.

    This is a name, with a whole company behind it, is search for a purpose where there is none.

    As long as they insist of "being their own format" (which they aren't, and never were), acting as if you needed their own player and file extension (for AVIs, or now MKVs?), and similar

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