Bauzi wrote:Can somebody explain me why DivX is still alive?
Years ago XviD just owened DivX and I don't think that DivX made that much of a progress. H.264 is superior and XviD is a free open source product. So why is it still alive? Why is there so much more hardware out there today that supports DivX and not other common distribution formats?
It's a mistery for me, but than again... Real is also still alive.
Because DivX is a business, whereas XviD is not. For most of that time, DivX stayed relevant because they had/have the resources to get hardware standards implemented. There is nothing technically different between DivX and XviD as far as their streams are concerned - both are MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile encoders, and output streams compliant to that standard (and XviD can easily create files that work on DivX's hardware). It's like asking why there are still commercial MPEG-2 encoders when you've got the freeware HCenc or the open source encoder in ffmpeg. Simply put, these things do have their place.
As of DivX 7 (DivX Plus HD), they do H.264 now too, and still have the clout to get hardware manufacturers to support their profiles on standalones (which isn't a bad thing by any means). And concerning H.264, the DivX H.264 decoder apparently ranks somewhere between ffdshow and CoreAVC in terms of speed, but it's free (and didn't suffer from the weightp issue CoreAVC did a couple months ago before the release of 2.0). I'm just parroting that info second-hand, as I haven't tried it out at all, but that's what I keep hearing.
Relating to the hardware vendors, having compatibility with DivX 7 provides what the Blu-ray standards
should have had but don't - like progressive 30fps.