Topic: Divx?

[Grey Ninja]

Ok, I just won't give this one up, as no staff member has told me why they aren't using Divx, I have gone ahead and converted the first Soul Calibur II movie to a Divx Movie.

I only have 10MB of webspace per account, and I have devoted this account entirely to serving this movie, but I had to cut a corner to do so.  The original movie for the conversion was the MPEG version of course, but the audio was too big.  As it stood, if I had kept the audio quality at the size it was, it would have taken 4MB, and I wasn't prepared to sacrifice THAT much video quality for a barely perceptible gain in audio.  I think the end result is fairly good considering that I don't have the original for the movie, and compression artificts exist for both the MPEG and Divx formats.  Nevertheless, I still think it's better than the WMV version, and if the audio was at full quality, it would be at about the same size.

Audio format:  128kBit/s, 44100 Hz Stereo.  2 channel MPEG Layer 3.
Video format:  380kBit/s, 352x240, 29.970fps, Divx 5.03.

Video was rendered at almost 60fps, total time being ~1:30 (that's 1 minute, 30 seconds) on an Athlon XP 1800+ at stock speeds.

Anyways, I hope I don't get into trouble for this, but I would appreciate staff comments.  I really think it would be a better solution that using WMV.

[PGC-Agent Cooper]

Yes, DIVX is good, but currently we're going to be using MPEG and WMV.  MPEG cause it works on everything without a download, and WMV because it's incredibly small.  Maybe someday we'll switch over to DIVX, but then people have to download a codec, and to be honest, even though it's retarded easy, most people can't figure that stuff out.

Don't spam our forums because "we're not tending to your needs".  We're a little busy here.  But thanks for the advice.

[Grey Ninja]

Well, I don't think I was "spamming the forums" with this, I just wanted an answer to a question that seemed like the logical thing to ask.  Anyways, thanks for your answer.  I appreciate a response.

[Matt]

Why should PGC use DIVX?

I would prefer QuickTime .mov and Windows Media Player .wmv

Sure, the files are bigger, but they are less compressed, and that is better.

[Grey Ninja]

Less compressed?  Sorry, but that's simply BS.  It's up to the maker of the movie to decide how much compression to use in the movie.  Divx can be at the same level of quality as your ordinary DVD if you so wish.  (While still being quite small)  The reason the one I made looks so crappy is because it was compressed once for the MPEG, then compressed again for the Divx copy.  I couldn't ease off on the compression, as it needed to be under 10MB.  Nevertheless, if I had the original file, it would have looked much better.

The reasons I want Divx rather than WMV are many.

1)  WMV is Windows specific, while Divx is multi-platform.
2)  Divx is an accepted standard for most, while WMV actually requires WMP9 for some of the movies PGC hosts.
3)  Divx is generally smaller and higher quality than WMV.

Reason #1 is the biggie.  It's not fair to Macintosh/Linux users to require them to use Windows to watch the game footage.  I am grateful that PGC is hosting the files in MPEG format as well, but I was just trying to suggest Divx as a means of reducing the file size to the same level as the WMV ones, while being MUCH more compatable with all users.  (who....  *cough* have to download WMP9 to play the WMVs....)  Hell, IIRC, Divx4 codecs are supplied with Windows XP.