DivX CEO on Hackers, YouTube, Technology

Cintia Barreto writes to mention a Red Herring interview with Jordan Greenhall The CEO of DivX talks about the company's roots, a little bit about YouTube, and how entertainment technology grew out of the file-sharing days of the late 90s. From the article: "We sat down and said what you just created will do these things, people will adopt it, they will use it to transmit high-quality video, probably movies, probably television shows, probably porn--on the Internet--and in this domain and in this particular way. In some timeframe, they will want to be able transmit that from the PC into the living room. It will be the kind of content that wants to live in the living room--just like what happened with MP3. You had music files sitting in your PC and you wanted to take them portable. Somebody had to invent the portable MP3 player. In fact, I was at MP3.com at the time, I got to physically touch the first MP3 player ever made. It was made by these guys from Korea--it was literally duct tape."

LITERALLY

[normal_guy]

True story. Early mp3-capable DAPs were made completely from duct-tape-based transistors. A single roll of duct tape can be used to make hundreds of thousands of mp3 players. Literally.

Re:

[yoth]

the nice thing about the old duct tape based mp3 players was you could run them off of toothpaste instead of batteries.

Re:

[Anpheus]

That's only for the McGuyver Edition models, now. The first ones were powered by blood and sweat, and that's how we liked it.

Duct tape?

[the_wishbone]

In Korea, only old people make MP3 players out of duct tape...

Re:

[Firehed]

Well in Soviet Russia, duct tape makes MP3 players out of YOU!

Re:

[turtled]

I think you are the only one. I don't think anyone has thought about Circuit City Divx in years. At the time, I just remember DivX avi or DivX ;) Circuit City Divx has been well forgotten. What isn't forgotten is the first DVD movie I encoded to Divx avi took 10 hours on a PIII - it was Black Mask (Jet Li) and I still have it in a spindle somewhere... gotta love the history of codec technology

Re:

[WaXHeLL]

You know, encoding a 45 minute TV episode to double pass Xvid takes about 4-5 hours on a 2.4GHz P4 (~350MB).

But I can say that quality has gotten better from the DivX 3.11 days to modern codecs.

Re:

[HeroreV]

Am I the only one that automatically wonders why people are still using DivX when Xvid has been shown to be much better? But then, I wonder the same thing about MP3.

Re:

[HeroreV]

Even my computer with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 1GB of memory was still having problems with H.264/AVC video. Perhaps that was just due to earlier decoders, and maybe the situation is better now that AVC is starting to gain popularity, but it'll still probably be a while before the majority of computers can decently handle it. After all, quite a respectable percentage of people have computers that don't even handle MPEG-4 part 2 aka ASP aka DivX/Xvid too well. The progress of x264 is quite exciting though.

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[strichards]

No, your not the only one. I suspect a lot of the people are too young and perhaps not in a Circuit City locale to remember the (failed) abomination. I still remember quite well...

Its like the Internet tubes of the video world.

[AHuxley]

"And it's made of a bunch of different tools."
"When you've invented an algorithm that does compare this frame to this frame and see if there's any difference between them, it's done."
Re Apple and "Random"
Why not tell us more about battery life, cpu usage, file size, quality, encoder software, costs and your DivX certified?

Re:

[nine-times]

Re: Apple and "Random", apparently "Random" is his way of saying, "we have no chance whatsoever, but I want to pretend like it could happen at any moment". Yes, of course, technically Apple could use DivX, but they've already chosen the video format they want to use, and integrated it into their OS and iPod. Even if DivX offered improvements to power-consumption, it would already take quite a bit for Apple to back away from h264 and encode the iTMS in some other format. Maybe... maybe if DivX was vastly

Re:

[Anpheus]

This is just my opinion, but wouldn't it be incredibly shortsighted for Apple to store original copies encoded in something as poor in quality as their H.264 implementation? The degredation in quality that they would experience every time they shifted standards would be terrible. I imagine that it's much more likely that given how cheap hard drive space is, they store it losslessly and can choose to encode it again however they want.

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[jZnat]

Video isn't nearly as bad as audio when it comes to transcoding, y'know...

Re:

[nine-times]

Three things to say about this:

• First, I don't know that anyone is talking about storing originals here. Would you store the original master recordings in DivX instead? I'd hope not. I would hope that, if you were really talking about storing originals, you want a lossless format.
• H.264 is very good, and can be basically lossless at a high enough bitrate. It's one of the better-quality options on the new high definition DVD formats.
• From knowing a little about this kind of business, I'd guess that Appl

"So he created the first DivX"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a funny way of saying "So he took MS's MPEG4v3 and disabled the check that prevented it from working inside AVI files".
And BTW it was not the "first" DivX [wikipedia.org] either...

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[Anonymous Coward]

i think you wanted this link [wikipedia.org]

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[Z1NG]

I think he meant the first portable device with the singular purpose of holding and playing music files in the mp3 format. At least thats what I think when I hear the phrase "first mp3 player". Granted, the statement wasn't qualified but I don't believe his meaning was too obscure.

Re:

[Jason1729]

What if someone used their notebook PC for that one purpose?

Anyway, the device he saw was clearly hacked together. There's millions of people hacking together projects at home. Ever hear of the ambient orb? Before I did, I'd embedded an RGB LED in my USB keyboard that sets its colour based on web events.

My suspicions are confirmed...

[nine-times]

I always had this vague feeling that whoever ran DivX was an asshole, and now I feel vindicated. I spent too many years just wanting the codec, and only being allowed to download it with a bunch of crappy software.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The barebones codec has _always_ been free of spyware, its the pro version which you either have to pay or take their little 'bundle'

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[owlnation]

Still, in his favor he isn't the CEO of the Real organization. Who just has got to be worse...

Re:My suspicions are confirmed...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Thank you Xvid and H.264 Divx isnt really needed now :)

Re:

[WaXHeLL]

I noticed that he never mentioned how OpenDivX was once open-source, and then abruptly pulled away.

"What the community really wants is a Winamp, not a Linux."

Eiger Labs MPMan

[gdav]

The "MP3 player made from duct tape" was presumably an early version of the Eiger MPMan [fortunecity.com]. I own a Compaq/Hango PJB-100 [mpython.com] (first hard disk based MP3 player, i.e. the ur-iPod) which still works fine (now playing Prokofiev's second piano concerto). Ironically, it actually is held together with duct tape now.

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[WaXHeLL]

See you got lucky. I bought the Diamond Rio, which was falsely advertised as the world's first MP3 player (the Eiger MPMan came out first in the US by a few months). My Rio broke within a year, and it was a joke compared to cd players (32MB of storage FTW).

Re the Eiger / Hango: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5622055-1.html [cnet.com]

Almost

[azav]

The first MP3 player ever made was probbably made using Soundedit 16 and Director Shockwave as .SWA files were MP3 with extra header information.

The first licensee of MP3 from Fraunhofer was Macromedia and they called it SWA. This was around mid 1995 IIRC.

I'm sure Buzz Kettles from Macromedia and Murat Konar were the first people to create MP3 playback and they did it through Shockwave.

The first multi song MP3 player was written in Director 5 in late 1995 and it allowed the user to select any song from a certain CD, The Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust. It was demoed by Phil Shiller who at that time worked on the Director time at Macromedia. Back then, it was compressed at a bit rate of 96 kbps so that it would fit on a 100 MB drive which at time cost around 200 dollars.

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[redcane]

Would not the fraunhofer institute have beaten them to it? I mean, they had a reference implementation I think?

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[azav]

Well ya. But the first licensee and the first publicly available implementation are another matter.

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[Yvan256]

According to SonicSpot [sonicspot.com], "WinPlay3 was the first real-time MPEG Layer-3 Audio Player for PCs running Windows." That's for Windows 3.11, people. Forget the power required to run shockwave movies, most computers were barely able to decode 44.1KHz, 16 bit stereo files at the time (Pentium was a expensive luxury).

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[azav]

I was at Macromedia when we licensed the MP3 technology from Fraunhofer in 1995 and saw this happen. There is no date of the file on the link you posted so I can't verify if this was written before what I saw happen.

Just because it works on Win 3.1 doesn't mean it was written when Win 3.1 was released.

From Wikipedia:
Later, on July 7, 1994 the Fraunhofer Society released the first software MP3 encoder called l3enc. The filename extension .mp3 was chosen by the Fraunhofer team on July 14, 1995 (previously, t

Consequences

[Lord_Dweomer]

First there were pictures. Then it became fairly easy for everybody to take digital ones, and share them and so it was.

Then there were portable MP3 players and DV recorders and cell phone videos followed by easy to use distribution services for people to share them through, and so it was.

My prediction? This stuff was just giving us a glimpse of what is to eventually come. There is a technology that is completely linked up with these others through the distribution channel it will inevitably find itself on. Desktop fabrication. I'm talking 3D printers with downloadable blueprints that people share through P2P networks. You think the RIAA and MPAA are bad? Just wait till car manufacturers and insurance comopanies figure out that there are people driving "pirated" custom printed AMG55's that aren't made by Mercedes. I realize there's already a pirated car market in the East, but it is NOTHING like what we will eventually have. We're going to seriously reconsider how we view products, raw materials, IP, liability, etc. This is only the beginning.

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[Kamineko]

Maybe the next step is to take TIME ITSELF into an easy to share, handheld form.

Hey, it might happen!

Never going to happen

[tentimestwenty]

Your logic fails in one key area. Creating real physical things costs a lot of money and you have to use a lot of raw materials and energy. No machine will ever exist which lets an individual make something on his desk like a cell phone. Even on a bigger scale, say 100s of units from a small undeground company is near impossible. The market competition is far too fierce to allow them viable profits.

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[elgaard]

Maybe not desks or phones.
But for example medicine is not that far away.

Instead of buying pills at the pharmacy we could download recipes from a secure site and produce it at home.

Enforcing patents and controlling access to medicine recipes, could make RIAA look innocent.

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[WuphonsReach]

Instead of buying pills at the pharmacy we could download recipes from a secure site and produce it at home.

Even that's pretty far fetched. Unless you're talking the *really* simple to manufacture stuff where you basically grind something up and stick it into a capsule.

A semi-valid example would be to look at how easy/difficult it is to make recreational drugs. Some of the drugs made from chemicals (I'm thinking PCP) are extremely hazardous to manufacture without proper tools/ventilation. Other drug

Brief history of Divx.

[Anonymous Coward]

Divx 3.11 Alpha: Used for a long time, just a hacked version of MSMPEG4 codec.

Divx 4: Opendivx, a new Simple Profile mpeg 4 encoder

Divx 5: Closed Source, ASP codec, the closing of the source led to the XviD project

Divx 6: Some improvements to Divx 5, and a new container format (like AVI or MKV).

There have been rumors about Divx making an AVC (h264) codec.

However, currently, Divx is FAR surpassed in encoding quality and speed by XviD. Also, XviD streams are COMPLETELY compatable with DivX players/streams, as

pr0n

[slimjim8094]

Funny how Porn makes or breaks much new video technology. IIRC(can't verify...), a major reason VHS won over Betamax was because of pornography and its embrace. Interesting that he is acknowledging it as a major driving factor in video technology. Especially because of its stigmatization.

Stolen Ideas?

[MrSteveSD]

I seem to remember something about DivX networks originally running an open-source project to collect people's ideas, then closing it down and going closed-source. Were any Slashdotters involved in the open-source project and the subsequent dispute?