[SDL] Speaking of Divx...

[Erik Walthinsen]

On Sat, 17 Jun 2000, Uriah Liggett wrote:

> Does anyone have plans for adding divx support to SDL SMPEG?  Or is anyone 
> currently working on a linux divx player period?

What people seem to completely miss is that all this 'DivX:-)' "support"
is nothing more than shims around the existing Microsoft codecs.  Why this
is so amazing is beyond me.  There is nothing interesting here for anyone
in the open-source community until someone writes and releases a full
codec in source form.  This isn't going to happen for a while longer.
MPEG-4 itself is hard enough, figuring out whatever M$ did to mutilate it
will be even harder.  Where this whole DivX thing may help is in dealing
with the ASF file format, but I don't see any code coming out of anyone
working on this stuff, only binaries.

In other words: don't hold your breath.  We don't want to have to call an
ambulance...

         Erik Walthinsen <omega at cse.ogi.edu> - Staff Programmer @ OGI
        Quasar project - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/quasar/
   Video4Linux Two drivers and stuff - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/v4l2/
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