The main purpose of DivX HiQ according to the developer page is to improve the video quality on sites like Youtube. I’m not sure about the quality improvement, it was not really noticeably for me. The new player reduced the cpu usage while playing videos by about 50% on a fairly fast computer system. Some users reported drops from a very taxing 90-100% down to 20-30%.

The DivX HiQ browser add-on displays a bar directly beneath videos on supported websites.

A click on the play button reloads the page and replaces the video player with the DivX HiQ player. The player offers similar controls than the standard player. Available resolutions are displayed and a click switches between them.

The player is an option for users who experience cpu usage spikes during video playback. Firefox users will notice that they cannot uninstall the add-on from within the web browser. It can only be disabled in the add-on manager. The only option to uninstall it is to uninstall DivX HiQ on the system which would mean that it is not available in other browsers as well. (see Why Do They Think It Is OK Response for a discussion of that problem in the Firefox browser.)

Google Chrome users on the other hand can uninstall the installed extensions just fine. Computer users who want to try out the DivX HiQ software can download it from the DivX Labs website.

Today should have been the day where Vreel goes live but unfortunately though this is not going to happen. The date has changed from May 6th to May 2008 and they have added a temporary forum and added several new questions to the FAQ.

And the information there make me doubt that the service will last long enough to become a serious competitor. In the forum thread “Why aren’t you launched yet” three answers are given why Vreel has not launched yet.

Firstly, our (previous) lead programmer liked to keep us guessing by vanishing for days at a time – making it near impossible to communicate any changes to him. I’m not sure if he’s even aware that we’ve switched to Vreel.net. We’re currently working with a highly regarded coder team, in order to avoid any further delays and disappointment.

So they switched from one coder to a coding team. It does look however make them look relatively amateurish.

Secondly, this thing has literally exploded since we started up – following the green light we got from DivX, we got a huge amount of attention – and a couple of servers based in the US just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Limelight Networks approached us with a contract with thousands of servers all over the world at 1.8TB/s+ connectivity – which we just couldn’t turn down. This does add on a small workload, and will slightly lengthen the testing process – but we shouldn’t be looking at any sort of dramatic time increase here.

That’s an understandable reason. Adding new servers, or a cluster of servers from another network should take a while.

And finally, we’re in the process of speaking with advertisement partners. As any videophile in the world can tell you, streaming HD video eats bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow – and rather than collapse under our own debt within a month, we’d prefer to find a solution which will allow us to run freely, without having to shut down most of our servers, or forcing a paid subscription.

This reason is the one I’m worried about most. They do not have a monetization concept yet which should be one of the first concerns when planning a high definition video portal. The Divx creators were not able to monetize their portal properly and decided to shut it down because of bandwidth and maintenance costs. What makes you think they will succeed where a company with huge ties in the Industry could not ?

The domain name was quickly switched from Divxit to Vreel and the logo was exchanged as well. A disclaimer at Vreel is stating that Vreel has no official affiliation with the DivX corperation. They surely have come to an agreement because Vreel is actively linking to and thanking Divx for their cooperation. A newly added Questions and Answers section gives us additional details about the new video portal.

Vreel will not take over the videos that have been posted at the former Stage6 video portal and start from scratch on launch date which has been delayed until May 6th. The service will be free just like the service at Stage6 was. Users will be able to view videos without an account. Registered users will be able to upload videos with a size of up to 800 Megabytes. The first days will function as a stress test of the server infrastructure.

There is no word on the piracy issue yet but it is very likely that Vreel will run into similar problems as Stage6.

Bandwidth and server costs accumulated to more than a million Dollars each month. As I said earlier the service was highly popular because of the great video quality which exceeded that of most other portals.

Tulluis informed me just a minute ago that a Stage 6 Clone was announced that would open its gate on April 29th. The homepage of the new service is Divxit and there is unfortunately not a lot to discover right now. Servers and GUI seem to be online already and the Divxit Core converter nears completion which seems to be the last step before the portal goes live.

It would be really nice to see a comeback of Stage 6. A service like that needs either a very potent company in the background or find a way to monetize the website properly so that it does not have to be closed soon after release. Monetization of video portals is not easy because companies know that the click through rates are horrible.

The Divx Pro version has several advantages over the normal Divx version: The DivX Converter, which is the official DivX video creation software application is included as well as the DivX Pro Codec which gives you higher performance and more encoding options.

Divx 6 Pro retails for roughly $20 so make sure you grab your copy before the offer expires. Divx 6 Pro can be downloaded for Windows and Macs, the process is similar although Windows users download Divx 6 first while Mac users have to enter their email address to receive the download instructions.

It seems that the download is also available in four languages including English, German, French and Japanese.

via Download Squad

As I said All In One Fix ships with several patches for known issues. The real difficulty here for the end user is that he has to select which patches he wants to apply. There is no initial scan of the system environment, not sure if this would be even possible to do in this case.

The fixes that can be applied are the following:

Audio Codecs Missing

• MPEG1 Audio Codec Missing – This component will un-register the default mp3 filter that comes with your Operating System and then re-register it: “l3codecx.ax”
• LPCM Audio Codec Missing – This component will un-register the LPCM audio codec and then re-register it: “mlcom.ax”

Video Display Problem

• Remove Bicubic resize filter – Included in many codec packs ex.: Nimo – Can cause no video to appear, or video that is upside down or mirrored.
• Remove XviD filter – This removes the XviD DirectShow decoder filter. Many codec packs ex.:. Nimo feature Nic’s build of the DirectShow filter that steals playback of DivX FourCC’s. Unfortunately, most of these build can not playback all DX5 series video and the result is the start of files not playing, video appearing green, or other artifacting.
• Remove G400 filter – This filter is part of several codec packs, including Nimo’s, and causes video to play upside down. It should only be installed on systems using Matrox G400 cards in the first place.
• Remove DivX Anti-freeze filter – This filter is included in codec packs (inc. Nimo) – May cause some instability with DivX Codec and Dr DivX as well.

Player Off Limits

• Sometime, when opening the DivX Player, it goes out of the screen but it is in the taskbar. This component will bring back the player in the middle of the screen. The player needs to be close before you run this fix.

Burning Engine Update

• This will update the DivX Player Burning Engine to the latest version.

Ordinal Error

• If you receive “ordinal 2250 can’t be found in PX.dll” error when starting the player, this component of the fix, will solve the problem.

DivX Player Reset

• This option will delete all the preferences already set in DivX Player. This could fix some bugs like runtime error, player freeze at startup etc…

Connection Diagnostic

• If you have connection problem, problem to download VOD, to create an acocunt or to connect to your VOD account with DivX Player, Please select this option.

  This will run some tests on your computer and create a log file (connect.log). The file will be placed on your desktop. Please include this file when reporting your incident.

Web Player Fix

• If the web Player is already installed on your computer but you are still prompted to install it, choose this option, it should fix your problem.

Explorer Crash When Open A Folder

• When opening a folder containing DivX or XviD .Avi files under some specific configurations, the thumbnail generation crash Windows Explorer.

  This option Disable the Thumbnail generation.

DivX not in the list of codecs

• Choose this option if DivX is not in the list of the Codecs available from your favorite encoding application

Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 Bug

• The program Easy Media Creator 9 from Roxio don’t seem to be able to decode the DivX or Xvid file properly. If you apply this fix, the DivX Decoder should work properly.

  DivX needs to be reinstalled after you apply the patch. You dont need to uninstall, simply download the installer from the following link and run it.

  http://download.divx.com/divx/DivXInstaller.exe

Change the Skin Of DivX Player 6.x

• Choose this option you want to change the Skin of DivX Player. This is useful in case you are using the 800×600 resolution and missing some part of the default interface.

  There is 2 choices for the 800×600 display mode, 800×600 or Grayout

Read More:

All In One Fix

The Divx pro serial will be send to the email that you have chosen during installation. To register the product copy the serial that is mentioned in the email and paste it into the Register Product window that can be accessed from the start menu. (Divx > Divx Converter > Register Products).

This is a limited offer as far as I know so make sure you head out immediately if you want to grab a free copy.

Just follow the five steps to convert the divx movies, you can add an unlimited number of movies to the list to convert everything in one run. Just select the first movie, add a new name if you do not want to overwrite the original file and take a look at the options. Change the video and audio quality which is a good way to reduce the file size if you don’t want the files to grow to big.

Add the file to the list and repeat the process for all the files that you want to convert. Use the preview option to take a look at the results before you proceed the whole list of files. The option to change the file parameters is great, a new window pops up showing the movie in the device that you have selected.

You do need two freeware programs for the whole procedure. The first is called Super. Super is a great converter that is able to convert to many formats including a DVD compliant MPEG II format. The second freely available application is DVD Styler which we will use to create the navigation of the DVD and the DVD iso file. We can finally burn the iso image using a program that is able to burn such images.

Start Super the video converter and change the following settings. The output container should be mpg (MPEG II). Everything else can remain the way it is. Drag and drop a avi file into Super and click on Encode (active files). Super will start the conversion and output the new mpg file in the directory where it is installed. The process might take a while depending on your cpu, graphics adapter and the size of the movie.

Once the conversion is finished we start DVD Styler and create our DVD menu which will later be used to navigate the DVD and start the movies that have been added to it. DVD Styler has a somewhat unusual interface which requires some explanation.

Action defines the next step after the first button is pressed. We want to play the first movie which is the default value for the first button. Add a second button to the menu and name it accordingly. Now we want the second movie to start which means that we have to select Jump to Title 2 instead of Title 1.

Continue this for all the movies that you want on the DVD.

Start by selecting a background from the left background menu. Now add the newly created mpg files by dragging and dropping them into the lower bar of DVD Styler next to Menu 1. The movies should appear on the right side of Menu 1.

A very basic menu would look like the following. Click on the buttons tab on the left side of the program. Drag and Drop one of the buttons to the right pane. You can move it around and make it smaller or bigger. Right-click the button and select properties.

The first thing that we should do is change the label that appears in the menu. Rename button 1 to the name of the first movie.

You could also create separate menus for every movie. Do this by right-clicking the lower pane which contains menu 1 and all the movies that we have added to it. Select Add New Menu and Menu 2 will appear in the pane.

You do need to create a button that opens Menu 2. The process is similar to linking to a movie. Right-click the button and select properties. Choose Menu 2 in Jump to and the link has been created.

Adding screenshots or boxart is easy as well. Just drag and drop them into the menu area and place them accordingly. Once you are satisfied with the results click on File in the menu and select Burn DVD. Select the temp directory and the output directory. Make sure you have enough space in both.

You can find further help in the DVD Styler wiki.

Divx Repair is a tool that is very simple to use. Just unzip it to your hard drive and run it from the location that you have unzipped it to. Divx Repair does not need to be installed and does not alter your system files or registry. Double-click Divx Repair to start the program. You can add files with the button Add Files (who would have guessed that, hehe).

The button Repair files starts the automatic repair process which tries to fix bad frames automatically. Only the bad frames will be deleted not the keyframes which means that you should be able to play the movie without errors from now on.

A error report at the end of the repair displays the amount of bad intervals that have been found. If a fix was necessary a new version of the movie will be saved in the same directory as the original movie file.

A drawback is that you install many codecs that you do not need and that could interfere with codecs already installed on your system. A more elegant approach would be to scan the media file to find out which codes have been used to encode the file. One freeware that is able to do this is Media Info.

Media Info loads the media file and scans it for codes that are needed to playback the file. It displays extensive information about audio and video streams, the bitrate used to encode the movie and the names of the codec(s). A great feature is a link to the website of the codec used where it is possible to download it and a link to a video player website that is able to play the file without downloading the codec seperately.

It will use the current divx encoder to transcode the movies and automatically detects a new version if installed. There is no hassle with codecs and the like which is great. If you have a divx encoder installed it is working. Dr. Divx supports multiple audio tracks and subtitle tracks as well.
The video transcoder is currently available for Microsoft Windows but will soon be available for Mac OS and Linux.

Under a deal announced Wednesday, the companies said they would work together to create a digital watermark system. Watermarking technology places a unique bit of code into a video or audio file, making the file difficult to copy or play without permission from copyright holders.

Update:

DivX Video on Demand has been introduced by DivX as their digital rights management system that content owners can use to protect their content and distribution channels against unofficial reproduction or copying of their works.

The format has been approved by major Hollywood film studios such as Lionsgate, Sony or Paramount, which in turn allowed content distributors to use the format for their distribution services.

One of the advantages of the format is the ability to play movies on different devices, including PCs, Apple Macintosh computer systems and Blu-Ray, Playstation 3 or DVD-Players that are DivX certified. Devices need to be registered first before they can be used to view contents purchased or rented from partners of the service.

Registration is relatively easy. Users first need to find the DivX device code which usually can be found in the device set up menu. Once they have the code they need to create an account on the official website, and select Register a DivX Certified Device from the options afterwards.

A registration video is then generated that needs to be played on the device to complete the registration process. The video needs to be transferred to the device, for instance by burning it to DVD, copying it on a USB drive or via network access.

Play the video on the device to complete the setup. The device is now registered and can be used to rent and buy movies.