Carreragtr at EB let me know about DivX giving away DivX Creator Bundle for free to celebrate their 5th anniversary.
Share the love, free = good.
Share the love, free = good.
DivX Creator for free!
- Thread starter digitalwanderer
- Start date
Jawed said:
I used a yahoo.com email account and the Divx registration was trapped as bullk (spam). If you are using a spam filter you may want to check your "trash". The sender is DivX and the title of the mail is "Your Free DivX Product Serial Number"
BTW, cool offer. I have been a DivX customer since day one, but I hadn't upgraded to 6.0 yet and now I get all this for free. Lovely.
I am going to try to preempt a problem I think many will have with the DivX Converter by posting this. Disregard this if you like it how it is.
The problem: By default the DivX Converter puts its output in a subdirectory of the installaltion path of the product. This may not be desireable for several reasons, like low disk space and keeping separate executable and document file partitions. There is no setting for this in the DivX Converter (major downer!), but you can change the output location using a tool available from DivX.
Get it here.
Read their instructions and warnings about using this tool. I only add this here because it may be tricky to find this tool or you may not know about its existence.
The problem: By default the DivX Converter puts its output in a subdirectory of the installaltion path of the product. This may not be desireable for several reasons, like low disk space and keeping separate executable and document file partitions. There is no setting for this in the DivX Converter (major downer!), but you can change the output location using a tool available from DivX.
Get it here.
Read their instructions and warnings about using this tool. I only add this here because it may be tricky to find this tool or you may not know about its existence.
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Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
wireframe said:
You can do the same thing just by changing the "movies folder" in the player settiings.
The converter is actually very limited compared to Dr DivX, which it was supposed to be replacing, and DivX came in for a lot of flack for supplying a nice new conversion tool that gives you far, far less options and control than the old tool it superceded.
However, DivX changed their minds after the massive wave of complaints, and are working on an Open Source version of Dr Divx. This looks pretty good, but who knows when Divx Networks will actually get it finished. Divx 6 itself was about 6 months late as it was, with the crippled encoder "supplied for free" with the Divx Create bundle. They currently claim it's days/weeks away from release. More info at the Dr DivX Blog.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
Ok. I did not install the player and neither was that mentioned in their FAQ.
I never used Dr Divx. I prefer using VirtualDub and AviSynth, mainly because I never got around to producing lots of videos for actual consumption. I did mostly testing and it concluded with Divx 5.x and others not being ready for prime time. Newer versions seem to be much better at handling tricky conversions so it's probably high time I got back into the fray.
Sounds interesting, but I am not sure how useful this will be. It really comes down to the codec and the features it offers. I will admit that the test run I did with DivX Converter using DivX 6.0 Pro looked very good. I have a particularly difficult sample file I use and it came through looking excellent. If this means I can forego pre-processing the video to accommodate the codec's shortcomings and DrDivx really is as relatively fast as it looks in their graph I will have to give it a go.
However, I must say that I am very apprehensive about using these "all-in-one" tools as bugs often make it less simple than they'd have you believe. Normally I stick to several simple tools that do one job and do it right. It saved me a lot of work, but, like I said, I have been out of it for a while so maybe these things have improved. Thanks for the heads up.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
wireframe said:
Dr DivX was quite good, as it was basically a front end to the codec. It was really needed as a way of easily interacting with the codec settings. The codec can do load of things (including cropping, resizing, etc) but Dr Divx allowed you to access all that and handled everything for you, including the likes of multiple passes very easily. This is why there was such an uproar when the replacement turned out to give the user virtually no options at all.
The new Dr Divx 2.0 should be as good or better than the old one, allowing you to do everything in the one tool that you previously did using several others.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
This is what I meant with "the features of the codec" before. However, even if it has the feature it doesn't mean it's good. There is more than one way to resize an image (bilinear, bicubic, and Lanczos come to mind). The problem before was there were always these little bugs hopping around (from app to app or codec) where you never could be quite sure. An example is a front-end relying on the internal cropping function of the codec. If this function was broken or not tolerant it would incapacitate that entire front-end.
Then you had front-ends that tried to win a speed battle by cheating in colorspace and you get sub-optimal results. It was, and I believe it still is to some extent, a mess. That's why tools like VirtualDub and AviSynth are so useful. They allow you complete control. You don't rely on the codec for anything but the actual conversion of the data to DivX format.
Another example is that some of these front-ends do not create fully compliant AVI streams or cannot read all streams correctly because they make lots of assumptions. Enter small tools like AviMux etc.
So, I can see why they strip options from these tools, especially if they are official and commercial ones. Keep it simple and for one purpose only. I don't really care, I am too interested in the actual workings to use it for testing. I was just really impressed with how DivX Converter + DivX 6 Pro handled my test file without any input from me. The test file is the video equivalent of driving on polished ice. Normally you have to very tenderly help steer the codecs to get them to produce good results. Converter just spewed out a perfect copy without any hints from me and that tells me things have improved.
Let's hope it's nice. Another tool is always welcomed in the toolkit. I always get excited about new tools, but then there is always that one instance where it fails and you need to go manual. The ensuing lack of faith means I fall back to the standard "known to work" toolkit and then I wonder when the perfect tool will come out
EDIT:
I also realize that most of these front-ends are little projects aimed at Joe Sixpack so he can make decent looking rips and not for enthusiasts who want to create the perfect conversion, so I forgive them most of their shortcomings. Then again, I tend not to use them. However, by the looks of Divx 6 output the codec seems to have matured to the point, in terms of quality at least, that input from the user may no longer be necessary. Then these simple front-ends become great because there is no longer a good reason to fiddle about with obscure techniques to achieve a good result.
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