DivX HiQ, Replace Video Player On Youtube, Other Video Sites

Martin Brinkmann
Dec 7, 2010
Updated • Aug 8, 2014
Software, Youtube
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Current Adobe Flash versions cause a heavy load on many computer systems during video playback.

This will change with the upcoming Adobe Flash Player 10.2 which is currently available as a beta version.

Users who are experiencing performance problems during video playback, especially when they are playing high definition contents on video sites such as Youtube, Facebook, ESPN or Break, have the option of replacing the Flash video player with a third party player; And DivX HiQ is that player.

The free software is available for Windows and Macintosh systems. It gets installed as a add-on or extension in popular browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox. One thing that I did not like about the installation was that it added itself to all browsers instead of giving the user a choice of web browser to which it should be added to.

divx hiq player

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.

divx hiq

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.

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Comments

  1. Brightcove said on March 28, 2011 at 10:25 pm
    Reply

    If you’re interested in an HTML5 video platform, Flash, or a way to transition between the two, you should look into Brightcove. They simplify the delivery so one piece of code can deliver a flash video or HTML5 video depending on the device being used. Plus they’re having a free trial now! You can check it out at http://www.brightcove.com.

  2. Peliculas Online said on December 27, 2010 at 9:04 pm
    Reply

    thanks for the video toy story 3 is fantastic

  3. Heinrich said on December 14, 2010 at 9:02 pm
    Reply

    Does anyone know a location where I can download the full offline installer like it was possible with the second Beta version?

    On the original DivX website I can only find an online installer which requires an active network connection.

  4. chalee said on December 12, 2010 at 9:27 pm
    Reply

    New computer – only three weeks old. Making a conscience decision to not install every little thing like I did on my old system. Have only installed Hulu, Netflix, MS Office, Firefox (first thing I installed). No games (so far) wanting to keep this system ‘clean’. But decided to install DIVX at the time did not know it would install plug in for YouTube. Watching videos on YouTube and decided to give it a shot.

    DID not work. Hung up computer, spiked to 100% CPU usage (warning from Norton about high usage) and still did not work. Have to CTRL, ALT,DEL to get out of it.

    Search internet to find out how to remove — and now it is gone never to return to my system.

  5. Ren said on December 8, 2010 at 6:13 pm
    Reply

    This thing did not work for me, it made my cpu spike up to 100% cpu usage, my computer became unusable, and i had to open up task manager which took for ever to open up, my cpu temperature was off the charts, usually it stays around 48C and it went up to the high 70’s, this thing does not work for me. note. I’m running a core duo cpu, running at 1.83ghz.

  6. milithruldur said on December 8, 2010 at 2:54 am
    Reply

    Nice find.

    If this checks out, then it can potentially replace the clunky Flash player on my browsers for video playback. Of course since the DivX HiQ player only handles videos, then it might not necessarily be a full replacement option for other Flash contents, especially those that implement ActionScripts and other technologies available only to Flash.

    But it would be nice if it can work side-by-side with Flash (I haven’t really read that far on the player’s docs). And also it would make good research to wonder how secure the plugin is, as I don’t want to be poking more holes than what Flash already does.

    /m

  7. Heinrich said on December 8, 2010 at 1:05 am
    Reply

    It doesn’t work inside a virtual machine. Firefox crashes everytime (VMware/WinXP). Just for your information.

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