In article <3cf95495@news.povray.org> , Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg>  wrote:

>   DivX *is* MPEG

No, this is plain wrong.

From their site at <http://www.divx.com/support/faq.php> they explain:

>>>


video compression technology developed by DivXNetworks, Inc.. It allows you to
create and watch videos with very high visual quality and relatively low file

high-quality video files over the Internet.
<<<

Be careful not the get confused about their wording "MPEG-4 video compression
technology".   This means by no means "MPEG-4 standard" and DivX (which is
much newer btw) is not part of the MPEG-4 standard (or any other MPEG standard
for that matter) at all nor is it compatible with it!!!

Further, as they have filed patents nobody can right now make any other
(legal) codec and you are forced to use what they offer or not use DivX.  As
their patent claim makes obvious it is simply a proprietary video encoding
technology developed by a company called DivXNetworks, Inc :-(

I can even prove that DivX is not part of the MPEG-4 standard this way:  The
MPEG LA which licenses all patents of the MPEG-4 standard has a website which
lists all the patents used as part of the MPEG-4 standard at
<http://www.mpegla.com/mpeg4/m4patentlist.html>.  As you can see, there is no
"DivXNetworks, Inc" in that list, so DivXNetworks, Inc probably with some
intention uses clever wording to give a different appearance to the facts.

They may be placing their data into the MPEG-4 file metaformat*, but that
doesn't make their codec "MPEG-4 standard" which is how many people seem to
interpret the "MPEG-4 video compression technology"...


    Thorsten


* Which is itself a subset of the QuickTime file metaformat:  Easily proven by
installing an older QuickTime and trying to open a standard MPEG-4 stream.  QT
will tell you (well, programs may show different messages of course) it
doesn't have the codecs to play that movie.  This doesn't makes QuickTime part
of the MPEG-4 standard either.  Newer versions detect MPEG-4 movie streams and
up to version 5.x tell you they are not supported.

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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