Hands on: DivX deconstructed

Someone once said you can never have too many fonts. I’m not sure I’d agree and, if you substitute video codecs for fonts, I think you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who’d go along with it.

The profusion of video codecs means that you can be confronted with a difficult and confusing choice when it comes to outputting video - DV, HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, DivX, Xvid, WMV, Real Video. What’s the difference between these formats?

In some cases the answer is very little; DivX and its open-source rival Xvid are both MPEG4 codecs, as is Nero’s AVC. Having said that, there are quality differences between them at given compression rates and, if you’re planning to produce content using these codecs, the availability of editing tools can be a problem.

This time we're going to take a look at DivX, a commercial codec that’s increasing in popularity, gaining support among hardware manufacturers, and adding new features and affordable authoring tools to its stable of products.

Modern codecs such as DivX are designed to be versatile. They can encode at a variety of frame and bit rates and apply varying degrees of compression, which means you can use a single codec to produce output for a variety of destinations.

The one thing that DivX has gained a reputation for is being able to produce good-quality video at high rates of compression, which makes it ideal if you want to cram a lot of video into a limited storage space. If you’re travelling and want to take your video collection with you for playback on a notebook PC or a PDA, then DivX provides everything you need.

The first thing you need to do if you want to use DivX is visit the website - www.divx.com - and download DivX for Windows 6.8. DivX is also available for Mac OSX. The free download includes the DivX codec, standalone player, web player, and 15-day trial versions of both DivX Converter - an easy-to-use transcoder application - and the DivX Pro codec, an advanced version of the DivX codec with preset encoding modes for video quality up to 1080p HD. The full version of the DivX Pro codec costs £10.99 and is a worthwhile buy, particularly if you want to produce HD resolution content at relatively small file sizes.

While you’re at it, you should also download the trial version of DivX Author. This is a new application that, as well as encoding video in the DivX format, provides tools for authoring DVD-style menus. The menus can be used to navigate between movies and to jump to chapter points within them.

Using DivX Converter
The great thing about DivX Converter is its ease of use. Once you’ve decided on the conversion profile to use, all you need to do is drag and drop files onto the applet, click the Convert button and the rest happens automatically. Five profiles are available: Home Theatre, HD 720p, HD1080p, Qmobile (for PDAs and smartphones) and Mobile (for phones with basic video playback facilities).

The Home Theatre profile encodes at full original resolution, up to a maximum 720x576 with a maximum average bit rate of 4,000Kbits/sec. Though there’s no custom conversion option, you can edit the settings of any of the preset profiles if you wish.

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