Apple adds Xvid to QT Components site

I wonder where David found about this from.

http://digg.com/users/koregaonpark/submitted

Thanks for being so friendly, TUAW.

you know, it's really frustrating when people new to digital video start talking about standards. Xvid and Divx are both 100% compliant with the mpeg-4 standard and are easily incorporated into the .mp4 container. Likewise, both .mp3 and .acc are a part of the mpeg-4 standard and the .mp4 container. From a standards standpoint, both formats are 100% acceptable. An .mp4 container with a divx-encoded video stream and an .mp3-encoded audio stream is exactly the same as an .mp4 with an h-264 encoded video stream and an aac encoded audio stream. And even better, a text subtitle file (.srt) muxed into the .mp4 container is completely compliant with the standard as well. Hell, even the way that nero does subtitles (muxing the original dvd subtitles into the .mp4 container as a "private stream") is completely standard. Apple choosing not to support xvid/divx encoded videos in quicktime/ATV is more like not supporting xing or lame encoded .mp3s in itunes than like not supporting theora files. Theora files don't meet mpeg standards. Oh, and the .mov container is completely outside of the mpeg-4 standard. Fun stuff.

XviD is mainly a MPEG-4 compliant _encoder_. Used for compressing video.

If you want to play MPEG-4 video files, the choice is yours and XviD wouldn't be my first. ffmpeg (VLC/MPlayer/Perian), QuickTime, DivX etc. It doesn't matter what you choose, all those decoders play MPEG-4 fairly well.

On the other hand, if you want to encode a movie to MPEG-4, then XviD is the way to go. There are other options but XviD is free and one of the best.

I never really liked the MPEG4 encoder from QuickTime and had trouble getting good results with it. Having an XviD codec for QuickTime means that I can encode MPEG-4 videos using XviD directly from any QuickTime based application. Before, I had to first export in a losslessy format and then use MEncoder to create a MPEG4.

I don't have to to this anymore and that's great news!

You really don't have any idea how popular xvid is. "infinitesimal?" are you out of your mind? Just because you don't use it doesn't mean every else also doesn't.

"Xvid is the de-facto standard of non-youtube video on the net."
I literally laughed when I read that. It's not even the defacto standard for pirated content (that's still DivX), let alone legal content.

If there is any current standard for legal content on the net it is h.264/mpeg-4 simply by virtue of the iTunes Store and everybody encoding things to be iPod compatible over the last year. If you discount iTunes, it's really a crapshoot with no real standard but with the most momentum still in h.264s favor (especially as new tech keeps minimizing the processing burden of h.264).

The only defacto standard Xvid will ever be is the defacto standard for people who only use open-source stuff, which is an infinitesimal percentage.

Why don´t you check this out?
http://blog.twenty08.com/2006/12/27/codec-pack-for-all-the-new-mac-users/

#3 and 11 - Xvid is the de-facto standard of non-youtube video on the net. (Yes, including those that can be found on that new type of site... what is it called again?... downpour?...deluge?...torrent? yeah that's it...) Alot of podcasts and other videos are distributed in it, because in general it's much less computationally expensive to encode in Xvid than H.264). Also it is an open source codec which matters to a lot of people. So yeah, "officially recognized" xvid support is a Good Thing. And as someone else noted, Perian doesn't always behave itwself.

#4 - because LAME uses MP3 which is both patent and royalty encumbered (anybody remember an evil organization named Fraunhofer? (sp?) Ogg on the other hand has been built from the ground up as a truly open source protocol; the specs and sample code are out there for anyone to use with no strings attached. Again, that matters to some people.

This is awsome for the 12 people who care! Can you imagine if the AppleTV supported Xvid? Apple would see a .00001% sales increase! Hell yeah!

Perian doesn't play nicely with quite a few of my vids, so I'll be downloading this.

All they need now is to display subtitles sync'd to avi files in Quicktime and goodbye VLC!

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Outside a hack this will never happen. Please. Blatantly support the BitTorrent community. Yeah, that'll really attract more movie studios to iTMS..