what's your favorite video format for compute based playback and why

[seether]

Really strugling to decde btwn divx, wmv, and mpeg1. I spend way more time watching tv eps and movies on my laptop than my tv anyway, and everything worth saving gets authored on dvd first, so its just a size/cu usage, not an archiving format issue.


divx playback eats my battery like no tomorrow, mpeg gives good battery life and no worries about playback on any system (like my old p200 laptop I'm relegated to a lot since my gateway is, well a gateway, hence something always flaking out), wmv has been great in my trials, but encoding seems to take forever and quality consistency has been hit and miss for me.

what does everyone else find yourselves using most of the time? Just curious. Any promising codecs on the horizon worth re-encoding a couple hundred hours of video for?

[Marshmallowman]

me I am happy with xvid+ogg, they are free and work well, I can also capture at full pal with no hassles using xvid. I like open source

[seether]

hmmm....

seen the names mentioned many times - never thought about looking into it . . . . . . . . . . . . googling now



ooh, another thought::: any linux/bsd port of wmp 6.4, or any worthwhile app with decent wmv/wma playback?

[Wombat]

Yup, mplayer. It uses WINE to use whatever Windows codecs you have.

[Gurm]

Wombat:

LOL read dZeus's post on the perils of trying video players on Linux. mplayer sucks just like the rest. It just sucks LESS.

Marshmallowman:

XVid is like Divx, only written by hackers, pirates, and opensource extremists. It fails his test for the same reasons - absurdly high CPU power needed to decode it in a reasonable fashion, and hence high power consumption.

I personally favor MPEG. Sure the files are bigger, but they run on any platform, require no codecs to make them work, and are totally standardized.

- Gurm

[thop]

gurm: i believe you have never experienced the magic of ffdshow. one decoder to rule them all! better quality, less cpu usage - whats not to like?

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Gurm

Marshmallowman:

XVid is like Divx, only written by hackers, pirates, and opensource extremists. It fails his test for the same reasons - absurdly high CPU power needed to decode it in a reasonable fashion, and hence high power consumption.

Why am I not surprised to hear such an extreme idea from you?

I personally favor MPEG. Sure the files are bigger, but they run on any platform, require no codecs to make them work, and are totally standardized.

- Gurm

Muahahahahahaha!!!!

[seether]

Marshmallowman - appreciate th xvid suggestion. played with it, wasn't really impressed.

After reading posts here for a couple of years, just about EVERYONE has come across as an extremist about something at one point or another. Gurm's divx comment wasnt extreme, just blunt - divx was just a lousy hack of an ancient MS mpeg4 codec reverse engineered and rewritten by theives, just more hardware intensive and worse quality is all.

Yeh ok, can't say anything about the "require no codecs to make them work" comment, but mpeg is the granddaddy of codecs - native support is/has been for almost ever universal, and the files arent that much bigger than decent quality divx

I'm probably going to just stick with vcd compliant mpeg for awhile. I can watch a 2 hour dvd from my dvd drive on one battery charge, and about 3 hours of mpeg from my hdd. i cant see a whole divx movie without plugging my laptp in, which kind of defeats the whole purpose.

LOL read dZeus's post on the perils of trying video players on Linux. mplayer sucks just like the rest. It just sucks LESS.

Well thats kind of what i meant, which app sucks the least - BSD/linux support isnt really that important anyway, just been awhile since i've played with any unix flavor and was trying to find any reason to make it worthwhile to set up a box with a non-windows os on it - maybe when I get bored with XSI and photoshop and want to go back to ASCII art

seriously though, thanks for the suggestion Wombat, but unless it's had a major reworking in the past year or so, wineblows

thanks for the constructive input everyone

[KvHagedorn]

I agree. I wish everything would stick with the standard old mpeg format. Macroshaft probably has some lawyers who make anything you make in wmv format macroshaft property anyhow. Anything that has to phone home to get big brother's permission to play it goes in the recycle bin.

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Gurm
LOL read dZeus's post on the perils of trying video players on Linux. mplayer sucks just like the rest. It just sucks LESS

Do you have a link?

[dZeus]

I think I ICQed that link, and not posted it here...

but here it is nevertheless:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/linuxvideo.html

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by vwdrivrco
seriously though, thanks for the suggestion Wombat, but unless it's had a major reworking in the past year or so, wineblows

Wombat's comment was a bit misleading - MPlayer has its own loader which is able to load Windows (and now Quicktime) codecs. It's completely transparent to the user.

And MPlayer rocks, whatever jwz thinks. (Although I admit I've never bothered with the GUI. mplayer  <filename>, that's all I need.)

[Slougi]

The gui is very good actually, it certainly beats WMP any day, imho. Installation in gentoo is a breeze too.

[Gurm]

Originally posted by Technoid
Why am I not surprised to hear such an extreme idea from you?

*sigh*

XVID is based on DIVX 3.11 code, no matter how much they claim to have revamped it.

DIVX 3.11 is based on the pirated MPEG4v3 code from MS.

So the order in which people have worked on the XVID codec is:

1. Microsoft
2. Pirates
3. Hackers
4. Opensource weenies.

The current versions alternate between poorly compiled and unusable. Thanks to Jammrock I now have a WORKING codec installer, before I had 8 installers and not a single one actually put a codec on my system that would play my XVID movies.

Muahahahahahaha!!!!

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANT. The codec is standard. There are standalone players that ONLY decode MPEG. You know full well what I meant.

- Gurm