Major announcement expected from Directv on June 15, regarding HD !!!

[950ash]

this is incorrect. DivX started out life as a hacked version of MS' then abandoned MPEG4 implementation in WMV. The MPEG4 AVC standard itself was never hacked however. It was always a legitimate standard. Also, currently while there are many standards (WMV, DivX, XviD, Real, Quicktime etc), all of them are based on MPEG4 AVC and in theory (and in practice most of the time) you can extract the m4v type video stream from each of those files and stick it in an mp4 container just fine and play it on anything that can handle .mp4.

NO its not incorrect, I just think that MPEG4 AVC is a general shortened name and right now saying there is a standard for MPEG4 would be wrong. Open source Codecs keep changing, forcing MS, Quicktime and Real to redo to keep up.

 An open source video codec project which was launched in 2001 to continue Project Mayo's open source DivX codec.
   
  Basically a short piece of history is required in here to understand this fully.
   
  Original DivX ;-) codec was not developed from the scratch, but was just a hacked version of Microsoft's WMV video codec. This version, best known as DivX ;-) v3.11 alpha (which was the last official version of the hacked codec), quickly became ridiculously popular among videofreaks all over the world.
   
  After its success, group of people, most notably the hacker behind the DivX ;-) codec, started developing a legal version of the codec which would be a real codec instead of basic hack of existing Microsoft codec.
   
  They launched an open source project, dubbed as Project Mayo (also known as OpenDivX) to develop this codec. After a while the codec matured, but the original developers wanted to push it further and started a company called DivXNetworks which started developing its own closed source version, based on the work of the Project Mayo. Eventually this closed source codec was released as DivX 4 (since then, we've seen this closed source version to develop further and currently, 07/2004, the latest version of the codec is called DivX 5.2).
   
  Now, open source guys didn't want to abandon the work of the Project Mayo and they continued to develop the codec further and the XviD was born.

[borghe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_10
http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-4/mpeg-4.htm

I highly recomend reading up on some or all of those pages, or doing google searches for more. You are really 100% wrong. Heck, even I found out I was a little wrong.

DivX, as the pages plainly state, was a hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG4 version 2 implementation. I was wrong in that it was built for delivery in ASF, not WMV. DivX extracted the codec so it could be used in other file containers such as (and most famously) AVI. However, it was still Microsoft's MPEG4 codec. MPEG4, as you can see from the links above, isn't just a term that they applied to the codec they were using. MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group. Yes, it is actually a committee that is part of ISO/SEC (the standards organization that has laid out standards from your CDROM file system to the way our plants have to operate and be maintained),  that came up with MPEG1, MPEG1 Layer 2 (MP2), MPEG1 Layer 3 (MP3), etc. The video coding we are talking about here, as linked to above, is MPEG4 Layer 10, or H.264. (actually the AVC portion of MPEG4 was jointly developed by MPEG and ITU-T, who for reference was the committee that in its original inception put together many of the standards for today's phone networks).

As I also said earlier, you can in general take any compliant MPEG4 video stream, in ANY container (Real, AVI, Quicktime, DivX, XviD, OGM, etc) and stick it into any other container and it will work fine. This is because they HAVE to work fine with each other if they want their stream MPEG4 compliant. The only difference between compressors is how they get the video to that point. How good their psychoacoustic visualization is, GMC, how effectively they are doing scene detection for keyframes, etc. but the resultant video stream nowadays is generally 100% MPEG4 compliant no matter which "codec" you are using.

The other thing to realize today is that Real or DivX or whoever isn't selling you their codec today, they are selling you their containers. Real has their own DRM in place, Qicktime has their own DRM in place, DivX also. Though Quicktime and I believe DivX can both write to an MPEG4 Layer 12 file format meaning which product you use is largely irrelevant as it is just an MPEG video stream inside an MPEG file container.

Hopefully soon, all of the proprietary containers will go away and we will just be left with a standard MP4 container that can be ported anywhere. Though with DivX just releasing version 6 and with it an update to their container for menu and subtitle functions, I don't see that happening anytime in the near future. by the way, those functions are features of their container, not thier codec which is still MPEG4. Which is why you can take a "divx" video stream and stick it in an MP4 file and play it in XviD, Quicktime, DivX Player, and Real just fine.

And for the record, MS uses MPEG4 also. However the license on WMV specifically states that it may not be reencoded or have any of its streams processed, so "legally" there is no way to get the video out of a WMV container. There are some tools out there though that can do it, but because of the license you'll never see mainstream apps like Nero Encode, DivX, or whatever be able to work with WMV files, even though they are just MPEG4 AVC and AAC stuck inside a WMV container.

And this isn't even touching the AAC stuff , both of which are also part of the MPEG4 standard Part 3 to be exact).

And to bring this back on topic, hopefully all of this explains a little better why there is no "version" of MPEG4 that we have to worry about DirecTV using. As long as they are using MPEG4 encoders (which they are) and have hardware MPEG4 decoders in the boxes (which they do), the stream will play just fine and look fantastic.

My real question is how tightly will they have the files DRM'ed on the upcoming DVRs... being able to pull the HD MPEG4 files off the box like we can pull the HD MPEG2 files off of the HD Tivo would be amazing. Depending on what kind of compression rate they use it could be possible to get an hour of HD on a DVD (hopefully they don't compress it too much more than that).

[gparris]

Thanks for the information, borghe, but it seems as though there was a malfunction of the Spaceway 1 while D* was trying to get it into a geostationary orbit at 101 and though D* got it back,  it will delay the Spaceway 2.

This means longer and aggravating wait for those desiring the information
about the new national HD channel rollouts and of course, the HD LiLs.

MPEG4 info and new boxes, etc. info is great, but the sats have got to work, first.

Any information on how LONG the delay will be in regards to the info about those tons of new HD nationals, now?  :rolleyes:

[borghe]

the spaceway 1 situation was unfortunate, however it should have no bearing in spaceway 2. and hopefully it won't have much of a bearing on the entire HD project. If they can still get the spaceway 1 stuff going before spaceway 2 launches it shouldn't be held up any more than expected..

hopefully.

if spaceway2 still ends up being the longest delay, it looks like August is still a possibility for launch, meaning we should still see stuff before the end of the year.

[borghe]

well, Ariane has officially rescheduled Spaceway 2's launch for October

http://www.orbireport.com/Logs/Log05/Log2005-10.html

This is in line with DirecTV starting testing of HD locals in the top 12 markets late October for an official rollout in November.

In other DirecTV HD news, HDNet is once again again at 1920x1080, though it is now only at about 15-16Mbps. For us locals, this is about on par with the data rate we get from WDJT-DT (though I would imagine different encoders are being used). The 1280x1080 was actually preferable IMHO. The descreased resolution isn't noticeable on any but the largest of displays, while the increased bits per pixel arenoticeable on vitrtually every display. But it does go to show that DirecTV is trying to come up with the best solution for their bandwidth problem.

Though with the MPEG4 launch imminent and the number of potential additional HD subscribers capable of watching MPEG4 (thanks to locals), I would imagine any actual national HD launches from now on to be MPEG4 only. Though it's just a guess.

[hdtvtechno]

as of 08-10-05  HDNET is back to 1280x1080i


http://www.widemovies.com/dfwbitrate.html