Codec-tacular!!! Xvid Binary for the Mac
Codec-tacular!!! Xvid Binary for the Mac
I'll do my best to not turn this announcement into another rambling manifesto, but it's awfully hard to explain how excited I am by this binary (well done, Christoph Nageli, you are a good and faithful servant) without giving at least a little codec background.
I've explained the idea of distributed distribution in a previous post and how important the impact of BitTorrent has been to the idea of the DigitalBicycle, but distribution is only one part of the equation. I could send an entire 13GB iMovie project over BitTorrent, but I'm almost certain that this wouldn't be a sustainable idea, and compressing the folder with some sort of ".zip" file compression might get it down to 10GB but even that might take a week to download and a way too much hard drive space. Fortunately, we can do a different type of compression using modern MPEG-4 based video codec's. Codec's aren't particularly exotic things, MP3 is an audio codec, MPEG2 (the codec DVD's use) has been around for almost 10 years in one form or another, and lots of music traders now use "lossless audio codec's" such as FLAC, ALE, and SHN to trade live shows.
Music sharing on the internet was popularized by MP3's, and there are already thousands of televsion shows and movies being shared in a similar way. Using the Divx codec (or the similar but open-source Xvid codec, or even the similar but yet somehow different 3ivx codec) people are recompressing full-length movies so that they fit on a single CD (<700 MB). To put this in perspective, a 2-hour movie would be about 26 GB as a DVstream file (imported straight into iMovie) and 4.3 GB as MPEG-2 files when you author a DVD. The beautiful thing is, the 700 MB can honestly be described as near-DVD, particularly when the person doing the encoding knows what they are doing.
So what's the deal with my excitement over the Xvid binary? Even though many file-traders have been sharing Divx files, Divx is a less attractive option for our project because it is closed-source (meaning our volunteer programers won't be able to incorporate it into new programs or tweak it to work better), because it's commercial (no assurance we won't be asked to pay to use the codec at a later time), and because it wraps files as an .avi which is hard to use with QuickTime based NLE's and DVD tools. 3ivx can be saved as either an .avi or .mov (same MPEG-4, different candy shell), but it's still not open-source and it's commercial (people correct me if I'm wrong). Xvid can work with either .avi or .mov and is open source. It had one major thing keeping me from using it though.
While Divx and 3ivx have been available as simple to use QuickTime components which only had to be dropped into a folder to use (I'm referring to OS X), with Xvid you have to compile your own binary from the source code, which is more complicated of an action that I can handle. Now though, the kind and benevolent Christoph Nageli has made a binary (a program, the result of the original code being compiled) available that is as easily plug and play as the Divx and Xvid codec's.
So hurray for Christoph Nageli!!! Your name will live forever in my blog (and for a while in my heart).
I'll do my best to not turn this announcement into another rambling manifesto, but it's awfully hard to explain how excited I am by this binary (well done, Christoph Nageli, you are a good and faithful servant) without giving at least a little codec background.
I've explained the idea of distributed distribution in a previous post and how important the impact of BitTorrent has been to the idea of the DigitalBicycle, but distribution is only one part of the equation. I could send an entire 13GB iMovie project over BitTorrent, but I'm almost certain that this wouldn't be a sustainable idea, and compressing the folder with some sort of ".zip" file compression might get it down to 10GB but even that might take a week to download and a way too much hard drive space. Fortunately, we can do a different type of compression using modern MPEG-4 based video codec's. Codec's aren't particularly exotic things, MP3 is an audio codec, MPEG2 (the codec DVD's use) has been around for almost 10 years in one form or another, and lots of music traders now use "lossless audio codec's" such as FLAC, ALE, and SHN to trade live shows.
Music sharing on the internet was popularized by MP3's, and there are already thousands of televsion shows and movies being shared in a similar way. Using the Divx codec (or the similar but open-source Xvid codec, or even the similar but yet somehow different 3ivx codec) people are recompressing full-length movies so that they fit on a single CD (<700 MB). To put this in perspective, a 2-hour movie would be about 26 GB as a DVstream file (imported straight into iMovie) and 4.3 GB as MPEG-2 files when you author a DVD. The beautiful thing is, the 700 MB can honestly be described as near-DVD, particularly when the person doing the encoding knows what they are doing.
So what's the deal with my excitement over the Xvid binary? Even though many file-traders have been sharing Divx files, Divx is a less attractive option for our project because it is closed-source (meaning our volunteer programers won't be able to incorporate it into new programs or tweak it to work better), because it's commercial (no assurance we won't be asked to pay to use the codec at a later time), and because it wraps files as an .avi which is hard to use with QuickTime based NLE's and DVD tools. 3ivx can be saved as either an .avi or .mov (same MPEG-4, different candy shell), but it's still not open-source and it's commercial (people correct me if I'm wrong). Xvid can work with either .avi or .mov and is open source. It had one major thing keeping me from using it though.
While Divx and 3ivx have been available as simple to use QuickTime components which only had to be dropped into a folder to use (I'm referring to OS X), with Xvid you have to compile your own binary from the source code, which is more complicated of an action that I can handle. Now though, the kind and benevolent Christoph Nageli has made a binary (a program, the result of the original code being compiled) available that is as easily plug and play as the Divx and Xvid codec's.
So hurray for Christoph Nageli!!! Your name will live forever in my blog (and for a while in my heart).
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