With ASF you can watch movies that are out in theators, with DiV/X you have to wait till the movies come out on Video or DVD. Once there out on DVD why not pay 2-3 bucks to rent the movie and save the bandwith time for something else?

With ASF you can watch movies that are out in theators, with DiV/X you have to wait till the movies come out on Video or DVD. Once there out on DVD why not pay 2-3 bucks to rent the movie and save the bandwith time for something else?

People just don't understand! Why are there movie pirates?

You think piraters are those who want to make money off the pirated stuffs? The answer is an absolute no.

Most pirates do it because they can't afford to get the original, or they do it to share with people who are less well-off. The prices are so unbelivably high for most movies, so how can people watch movies that they want? Theaters only show most movies for a limited amount of time. And if you want to watch movies that have come out for sometime, you have to purchase it on tape, on VCD or on DVD, and in order to get the quality you have to buy them on DVDs.

Alot of people may be able to afford buying DVD players, a large enuf Tv and a decent sound system in order to enjoy the movies in full. But there are even more people out there who will not be able to afford all these. Imagine a father working on low wages and has a family to support, or students who depend on their parents to pay their tuition fees, or some of the "lower class" workers who earns hardly enuf to get a decent living. So does this mean that these people will not have the right to enjoy? Movie companies just don't get it, they are charging so much for the movies that only those rich people can afford them. If the movies are affordable to everyone, then they can earn even more by selling in a much larger volume. This is what mass production is all about.

And if you can't afford it then what do you do? Those who has the knowledge and skills will try to pirate them. Who said that pirates are bad? Pirates are better than those movie companies who can think of nothing but to make money, pirates are not selfish, they share their knowledge and skills with other people who are being cheated by those money-thirsty companies.

I'd said praise the pirates who work so hard so that other people can benefit from it. And curse those who are doing everything to steal money off the poor.

here is an excerpt from maximumPC Magazine

Divx is dead:

Divx, the much-maligned
competitor to DVD, is dead.
Only 90,000 units of the
technology were sold com-
pared to more that 1.2
million regular DVD units.

Know your sources sure it's causing problems now but it failed once already and it's very difficult to pull off a perfect copy properly

Did you even read the above article at all?! :
"...Unrelated to the now defunct DVD rental system..."
The DivX on topic here is a codec, such as Cinepak, Indeo, or Sorenson. A way of significantly compressing the size of a DVD movie.. Making it easier to download, watch, and pirate. (Example... no one wants to download a 50MB CD Quality WAV, so they get MP3) The DivX you are talking about are those rental DVDs that you didn't have to return when you were done watching them. Hope that clears it up.

howdy, you all have nice comments but there seems to be one thing missing.. the diffrence between ASF and dvix. i'm still new at divx (3days now) and i have already "obtained" 3 dvix movies and i must say *WOW* i'm used to watching crappy ASF rips with 15fps and 200kbps stream quality. but divx looks WAY better. at least the ones i have seen. ASF movies are about 250-400mb each and the Dvix movies i've seen are only about 550-650mb. to me the diffrence in quality are worth the extra space. you cant put 2 350mb ASF movies on a cd but 1 dvix movie fit's nicely on cd.

i own many DVD's but the only reason i buy them is cuz of the quality now if i can save $35+ (in canada) for about 5 hours of my time if you do the math i save money (based on working for 5 hours @ $5hour minus taxes) "crime pays"

Let me reitterate a little revolation I've had (which has allready been posted here before, no doubt). I am an on-and-off IRC movie addict. I am just now realizing that it's a total waste of time. Allow me to try to define a simple equation.

Given: It takes a considerable ammount of time to get a movie (nAVI & ASF are bad, DivX is worse, VCD and MPEG is worse yet).

Given: Time is money. If you're a college student, you or your parents are paying a ton for you to be there. So, your time has a qualtifiable dollar value. If you're not a college student, you could be using the time downloading movies to be working and making money. (see the bottom of this post for a better explanation of this)

So: It takes a long time to find these movies. If you're a newbie, you may not even know where to look. Then you have to beg people or wait for automated servers to give you your turn. Then, you have to download the movie. Then, if the transfer dies, you have to find the sender again and do the whole process all over again just to resume and complete the movie. This whole process could take hours. Downloading alone takes hours on regular Cable, DSL, T1 or T3 lines. Then all the searching (unless you have connections) takes hours too.

Let's say it takes 6 hours to get a movie. Download time, hookup time, resume time, and all that included. (Believe me, I've spent WAY more than that trying to get certian movies) If you worked at a minimum wage job for those 6 hours at $5.50/hour, you would have $33 (minus tax). That's almost enough to go buy the movie on DVD with the great quality, cool features, and all that.

So, you're a college kid and don't have the big TV or the DVD player? Well, someone's paying 10 grand or so a semester for you to go to school. Divide that by the, say, 20 weeks you're there comes to like $71 dollars a day. So, you go to class and sleep and stuff but spend the other 1/3 of the day on IRC trying to get the newest flicks. That's $23 you wasted (and that's a GROSS underestimation). Given a few days or weeks of this and the wasted $$$ could afford you a big TV, the DVD player AND the movie. So, mom and dad shoulda bought you that stuff and told you to spend the time you waste on movies on studying.

The whole point is, it takes WAY more time than it's worth to get movies on the net. I thought it was cool because I don't have a TV, VCR, or DVD at my school. Only a computer and monitor. But, really, I should have spent all my IRC time putting my folks' money to good use. And if I wasn't in college, I should just get a job and make the $$ to buy the movies. Looks better on a resume than "Spent afternoons waiting for queues to clear on IRC fserves". Consider it.

Here's the theory on working: Theoretically, you could be working 24 hours a day; but you need to eat and sleep. So, you decide not to work in order to eat and sleep, thus sacrificing the money you could make in order to stay alive. Essentially, you are "paying" to eat and sleep. If you decide not to work so you can stay online and get movies, you are again "paying" by not making money durring that time. This sounds crazy but major economical models are based on this principle, I believe.

Not everyone is a college student. I download movies while doing something else, computer-related or not. It's done in the *background*. Have you ever calculated how much time you spend sleeping? Your parents are paying WAY more for that than the time you spend downloading movies.

Time is money eh.. It must be nice for you to earn cash while your sleeping. I guess it never occured to you that a lot of people set-up their PCs to download overnight therefore costing them $0.00 in time as they are sleeping. I wonder how much time you wasted coming up with that BS. Hmmmm but hang on since when did having fun have to be a calculation of cost.

you dont just have any fast sites :P

umm I have news for you. You can even make money while downloading your movies goto www.alladvantage.com they pay you .50 an hour not bad for sleeping and getting movies:) if you sign up use my id
GTF-804

Ummm... Wow, what a revelation... Absolutely no one knew about AllAdvantage until you mentioned it :/ Too bad, your about 6 months too late with this idea. Everyone who was looking to make pocket change with their computer pretty much knows about AA by now.

If the compression is as small as they say, and the quality is as good as they say (unfortunately, I have yet to try this out myself); yes, with products like Citrix VideoFrame and what not out there, as well as the proliferation of broadband internet access, yes, this could very well be interpreted a threat. However, to go so far and call this the mp3 of video, that is a bit too far.

Divx is merely hacked microsoft mpeg4 codecs so if anyones a** is to be sued its microsoft. You blame the author of decss for decrypting dvds when all he wanted to do is play dvd on linux like so many other people who wanted to. So blame microsoft for this pirate format, sue the a** off them. Also a lot of dvds arnt even encrypted so decss is not even needed. You can rip Lock Stock And 2 Smoking Barrels cause this dvd aint encrypted.

FYI: DiVX cannot be streamed

The format allows for an index block at the end of the file and therefore, the entire file must be received before playback can occur. We hope to overcome this problem eventually, but currently we are involved in other projects.

dark matter

Ignoring all the pirating and movie ripping potentiallity of the format, how streamable is it? Does it stream just as well (or better than) as Real, MPG or ASF? Cause if so, I'd like to get my hands on it for the purpose of web pages, to replace the ASFs I have there (if it's actually any good)

asf=microsoft mpeg4
divx=microsoft mpeg4
its the same thing you lamers

slipknot_: i agree with you... these really are a bunch of lamers :)

No shortage of lamers for sure !

You Cant ****ing stream DivX. Its not like ASF were you can play an incomplete file. You have to have downloaded ALL of the .avi to Play the file!

ehh.. id rather watch the dvds when they come out on my bigscreen sony tv at home. i see that this will be pretty cool because of the free movie thing and i will admit that i have hooked the tv out to my puter and watched movies with the old man, but the quality wasnt there , the sound wasnt there, and it just wasnt as good as the real thing. i mean whats the point of having a dvd player. its supposed to be the high quality. i think a lot of people will choose quality over copied ones in the long run.

DivX is not a threat to people who enjoy watching movies on large size screens with nice 5.1 surround sound, it is however a threat to the college kid sitting on a nice T3+ connection who doesnt have the money for a 500 dollar dvd player and 30 dollar movies...DivX movies are becoming easier to find now than ever before, thanks to the fact that any fool with a dvdrom and a 20 gig hard drive can make them and start his own DivX group, my thoughts are if you dont wanna pay 30 bucks for a movie, just leech the divx, but if you like it, just buy the movie and see it in all its glory.....thanks- ascenzion

way to go...leach on piraters!

what you don't realize is this thing called the trickle down effect of theft...prices go up

so if you like buying the DVD movies like me, why in the world would you want to pay for what piraters do. I preferred the $24.99 price over the newer $34.99 prices creeping up thank you very much.

Wow, i'm trying this DivX encoder now...this works so nice. so far i just changed a 270 mb mpg file into a 70 mb avi file with the same quality. Now i'm trying to backup a dvd and see if i can get it all on one cd with double the res i used before. =] This is insane. You gotta try it out for yourself.

Q: Why the hell did they call it DivX?

The closest answer I could find to your question was from another pirate in the same channel. He said, "The creator had never heard of the Circuit City DivX until after he created the codec."
I really don't think this is true, however. Who in their right mind would come up with the name DivX for a movie codec? :)

ok, heres the deal, I've been an encoder for a long time now, started with asf's, learnd how to make the scarce nAVI files, and was one of the first to use the DivX codecs for dvd rips. to clear things up, the DivX codec is similar to mpeg4v3 just a little tweaked. the mpeg4v3 relies heavily on processor, and DivX relies less on it. DivX rips use the DivX codec for video and mpeg layer3 for audio, squeezing it into an avi is the only part people have problems with, and sync is the worst, its a simple way to compress a dvd to an avi. I believe there is no threat there, just people who want to watch some movies and dont really feel like paying for em. Personally, I buy all my dvds because they just rule.
-GuANu encoder/ripper for FreeMpeg4

You can find a nice guide on how to build DiVX movies at http://divx.vcdguide.com.

the reason why mp3s are so popular is cuz they are small, and people don't wanna pay $15 for a whole cd, and people like to listen to music while on their computers, and the computer speakers are fine for music playback, and people don't mind listening to songs over and over. None of this is true with movies. they are huge and at my college it still takes hours to download, meanwhile when i play an mp3 while downloading it, it's done downloading before the song's over. people don't mind paying $15 for a movie or even better, $9.50 at the theaters, or still better, $2.50 to rent. I have a tv tuner on my 19" monitor and i still hate to watch tv on it. i just walk over to my 53" tv. it's not like i'm gonna write a report, chat online, and watch a movie all at the same time. it's even better if you watch movies at the theaters. Lastly, movie's are about 2 hours each and not too many people like to watch them over and over.
for downloadable movies to be popular either files have to get extremely small (like 200 mbs), retail movie price have to become ridiculously high, or internet bandwidth avalible to the majority of users has to increase to at least T1 levels with college bandwidth at least T3.

i would never say that divx is an threat to the movie industry but it sure as hell has a good punch at it. most people out there seem to forget that some of us at college are here just doing time in order to get a degree and the only bit of entertainment which is easily accesible is a downloaded movie from the net. i have seen a new movie every other night for the last 6 months thanks to asf and divx and a t1 connection at uni. it works and reaches the people who are willing to throw in the time to find them and download them.

i don't care much about pirating DVD's cuz i actually like to buy them...although this might be a good idea for some of those movie houses who like to charge above the standard premium $25+...they were originally intended to be $24.99 and under.

This DivX isn't new to me, maybe 3 months old(for me), and was always curious to it's claims but never bothered with it. From what I remembered, it was supposed to offer NEAR DVD quality on a single CD but without the sound quality or tracks, so no multi version, multi format audio.

Oh well, there is a way to prevent any and all pirating efforts...but I won't be divulging that unless someone pays me...muahahahaha.

*cough*
http://www.digital-diges...d/support/mpeg4mp3.html
*cough*

if anyone knows where on IRC these files are being distributed and/or where to find the codec to view them, please respond to this message somehow.. thank you

What program do you recommend me to use for getting on those servers.

sure, tell the whole world....
* they will come in and close the channel (or get people)
* There is already too little of fserves, sure tell more people...

why dont we Just give you server Location's & the siteop's Names
then we can read about all the Bust's from it. Wouldnt that tickle your fancy?

Get a Grip dude, if you want something go out and get it yourself.
I'd suggest going back and re-reading the article it gives a Good place to start looking in it.

Some questions here. Isn't this just a slightly tweaked version of mpeg4v3? I have used this codec and I don't see where the author gets this "dvd quality movies - at a fraction of the size" bit. Perhaps he means at a fraction of the size of comparable mpeg-1 encoded dvd rips and at a severely reduced frame size. What I want to know is how much better is the actual visual quality then Microsuck's free Windows Media Tools version of Mpeg4v3 and why, other than the fact that Windows Media Tools embeds a unique identifier into outputted asf's and will not let you use their mpeg4v3 to output to avi. Also, what was Divx's intended use for this codec? Have they made any comments about the current popular use of the codec?

(quoted from the DivX info:
"This is a Hack of selected version of the M$ MPEG4 codec FOURCC and CLSid code have been hacked so you can make ALWAYS WORKING AVIs it can coexist with retail version of the media encoder tools and newers or hacked version of M$ MPEG4 codec."

it is version of mpeg4 but much much better than anything before....

I think the real question to ask is how *much* of a threat this really is to the movie industry, etc... Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, I'm not particularly convinced either way, but it would be a good idea to estimate the number of people actually willing to go through these hoops to get a movie on a CD that you can then watch only on a computer.

Let's say there are about 65 million people in the US on the Internet. (Please help me with the numbers and my math if you want). We'll get rid of America Online users for several reasons: 1) they're probably on a modem which isn't sufficient bandwidth to effectively pirate movies using DivX and 2) there are a lot of AOL users and I'd like to eliminate some people for the purpose of this argument. So, we nix 20 million people or so.

That brings us down to 35 million. Now, this really seems like something that would be pursued by college students or people that are younger. Maybe I'm being prejudiced, but something tells me that Military scientists and "regular joes" aren't going to be involved in this technology. It's hard to say what the percentage of 35 million that is but I'd venture to guess it's a lot. Maybe we're left with between 5 and 10 million people that would even be able to or have the desire to get involved in this technology. And say half of them just don't do it because it is illegal. I know that my school provides the necessary bandwidth and I have a CD-burner. But I also know that it does take some time to accomplish this. Wait for the download, the conversion, the burning, etc... it's not the most productive thing to be doing when you could just buy the DVD fror $15-30.

So now we're talking at most maybe a couple million people? Out of 270 million Americans? Is that really a threat?

65 - 20 = 35. It really does, belive me.

Okay - obviously that math was wrong but for the sake of argument, maybe we can get rid of 10 million more people anyway. I dunno, I'm just trying to run one possible scenario. Disagree? Let's hear it.

Consider this:

USB2 will come out later this year and with it inexpensive portable hard drives

IBM just released a 75 GB hard drive, and developed technology that may allow capacties of 100x that much in a few years.

So whenever someone rents a DVD, he can copy it to his hard drive. It would be possible to store 15-125 movies on a current hard drive.

Now you friend comes over, connects his hard drive to your computer and lets you copy your favorite movies...

John

I don't think this is a treat. People who would go through all the trouble making miniDVD would not buy DVDs in a store anyway. People who have money to spend on DVDs wouldn't spent time to rip (download) one.
I've spent last couple of months ripping and encoding DVDs (my own of course =)) for the fun of it... This is pain... Some DVDs do not store mpeg stream clean, so there is lots of cut and pasting needed before you can encode. Quality still not near DVD, unless you set bitrate to 6000kbs with Lo-Motion codec and this produces AVI just maybe half the size of original MPEG2. Then you loose all the extra DVD features, menus, languages, subtitles (you can get some of these but it's even more pain). You loose AC3 sound, for me it's a big deal. It takes lots of time and system resorces (~10 hours to encode 120min movie with dual 525MHz celerons, and probably couple days to pull it together) it takes and at the end cost of storing good quality movie on the HDD is high and unconveniend on multiple CDs.

PS.
for more info look www.digital-digest.com, www.dvdpiracy.com and q-bert.x2.nu/

well i don't think yer quite right, i buy dvd's and i rip and decode them in DivX, and i only do this so i can req another 1, so don't say people aint doin it :)

Well DivX is not a threat like MP3 this is just hype. MP3's haven't killed off the music industry have they and neither will DivX. The files are arond 650mb which too much for most people expect for us with very high bandwidth :).

And also can I recommend DivX. The quality is superb. :)

Copying movies onto a 75Gb hard drive ?

hahaha. good one. Which movie is worth all that HD space ??

any movie thats free!!

f1racer... you are an idiot... he didnt mean that you would copy 1 movie on a 75 gb hd... the biggest dvds are around 8 gb... thats still big and still unreasonable but it still doesnt change the stupidity behind your comment

Who in their right mind would take a 8 gig movie and keep it on their HD?

Yes, they're talking about the future, with 75 gig HDs but do you keep any 800 meg files/movies on your 8+ gig HD now? I don't.

"but do you keep any 800 meg files/movies on your 8+ gig HD now?"

actually, I have several -

10 VCDs @ 1GB+ each
5 DVD RIPS (MPG) @ 1GB+ each (these are my own DVDs...)

so..if I have these things, alot of others must too

and why does everyone assume that people download these rips? I sure as hell dont...a few contacts and a cdr burner goes along way.

Americas! Yeah OK!
Forgot about Dre, no sorry Europe and the other continents.. Americans tend to think that there only is 2 continents North & South America.
divX has hit bigtime all over the world.. and yes it will be a definite threat to the Film Corporations!
Check out www.isonews.com to see how many divX films are circulating out there alredy.. and increasing everyday!
There are probably smaller non-ethical companies working on hardware solutions already! And who knows .. it might just be accepted once it's standarized.

It's not only DVD rips but you can encode anything with it.

think about it.

WHOAH there tiger, dont get too excited. Ill try to ignore the geographical p**** envy there but your enthusiasm over DIVXs effect I cannot. Pirating movies is no new thing, and I think we all know that. For those of us who have been in the "scene" for a while we know that pirating DOES NOT equal the collapse of commerce. Let me say that again except louder:
PIRATING DOES NOT SINGLE THE END OF COMMERCE!
Like many people in high school and college, I did not have the money to pay for movies,games, or cds. It was either pirate or not see them. But I tell you when i DID have money i most definately spent it on movies, music, or games. Me and my buddies went to the movies EVERY week (not much to do in my college town). We rented movies when we wanted to watch movies at a friends house.
YES, i had 10 people over at a time to watch the American Pie rip. YES, i spent many a night running my own battle net server so me and my friends could play the Brood Wars beta. Did that stop me from paying to see Romeo Must Die last night, or from buying Asherons Call last week. NO!
Let the pirating hang up go. The people who are getting into this DIVX, regardless of how popular it becomes, are going to a lot of effort to make it work for them. If youve ever searched through all the crappy trading/listing/ratio channels you know that pirates work for their gold.
IT WILL NOT HAVE ANY EFFECT ON THE INDUSTRY, unless those DVD wh***s get their pannies further up their a** and think they can sue everyone and his brother just like the RIAA.

Its the digital age boys and girls. Anything that can be protected can be cracked. Stop whining and figure out some other way to feel good about yourself.

ARrrrrrrrrrrrrr matey!

RogueOne