Filed under: Video
Our own David just texted us to let us know that Apple has added Xvid to its online QuickTime Components list. The Xvid-for-QuickTime component, which you can download here, allows you to play and encode Xvid video. As the writeup mentions, Xvid follows the MPEG-4 standard.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aron Trimble said 2:44PM on 4-05-2007
OR you could download Perian!!!
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Jason Ross McMillan said 2:52PM on 4-05-2007
wow. could Xvid be coming to apple tv. That would make it worth the money.
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Nick said 2:59PM on 4-05-2007
It's usually put in Microsoft's avi container, isn't it? Or am I mistaken there?
I suppose this is useful if you have video in the format. But I'd sooner take content in straight mpeg-4 - preferably H.264 and AAC sound in a .mp4 file.
Multiple formats are the bane of online life.
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KissTheRing said 3:00PM on 4-05-2007
Ok next, free built in AC-3 audio (one that doesn't cause intel machines to choke from time to time). Also, before anyone says it, forget Ogg, why do you need it when LAME is free and better supported.
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Leonard Nimrod said 3:09PM on 4-05-2007
Could AVI support part of a default softwar update from the AppleTV and the next version of iTunes?
It would mean that AppleTV could play many more formats to make customers happy, but wouldn't that ruffle the feathers of their video content providers?
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Lobato said 3:20PM on 4-05-2007
All they need now is to display subtitles sync'd to avi files in Quicktime and goodbye VLC!
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Leonard Nimrod said 3:31PM on 4-05-2007
Leopard will offer Close Caption support in QT. So, I'm guessing that SRT files will play in QT and that the iTunes Store will finally offer this as embedded option in its TV and Movie content.
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Travis Bell said 3:33PM on 4-05-2007
A52 Codec doesn't choke on my Intel MacBook... plays AC3 Xvid's perfectly fine.
http://trac.cod3r.com/a52codec
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mike said 3:42PM on 4-05-2007
All they need now is to display subtitles sync'd to avi files in Quicktime and goodbye VLC!
--
Outside a hack this will never happen. Please. Blatantly support the BitTorrent community. Yeah, that'll really attract more movie studios to iTMS..
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Rae said 4:30PM on 4-05-2007
Perian doesn't play nicely with quite a few of my vids, so I'll be downloading this.
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James said 4:58PM on 4-05-2007
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!
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Donald Burr said 5:34PM on 4-05-2007
#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.
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Jakob said 6:13PM on 4-05-2007
Why don´t you check this out?
http://blog.twenty08.com/2006/12/27/codec-pack-for-all-the-new-mac-users/
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Marlon said 6:13PM on 4-05-2007
wait, does this mean divx plays too?
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James said 11:12PM on 4-05-2007
"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.
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bozs13 said 8:32AM on 4-06-2007
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.
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Adrian said 11:29AM on 4-06-2007
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!
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williedigital said 4:20PM on 4-06-2007
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.
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koregaonpark said 12:27PM on 4-07-2007
I wonder where David found about this from.
http://digg.com/users/koregaonpark/submitted
Thanks for being so friendly, TUAW.
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