[DigitAl56K]

Originally Posted by Neillithan

From what I can gather, they are going to be using the .mkv (matroska) container, which IMO is a great thing. However, this poses a problem with existing videos already using the .mkv container.

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Will DivX be able to play "all" existing .mkv files?

Not all existing files (in hardware). I think that is impossible to accomplish and you've already recognized the problem:

Originally Posted by Neillithan

Currently, HD movies and videos using the .mkv container usually have no restrictions when it comes to video and audio compression settings.

In this situation it's simply not possible to create an interoperable platform across many device categories unless every manufacturer is willing to quickly move to the most high-end expensive H.264 decoders on the market. As you pointed out, even in that case content encoded at level 5.1 is still going to be a gamble.

What we're trying to achieve is a high quality HD format with an assured playback experience on a very wide range of devices (think DVD players, set top boxes, connected devices, even Mobile devices eventually) with the aim of making available devices at reasonable price points. The goal is not to make every device support every variation of H.264 and it's important to understand that difference. The question we're trying to answer is, "Can we create a very high quality format using the benefits of these new technologies, finding a good balance between the features they offer and device interoperability, all without sacrificing compression too much?". This was also the goal with DivX 6 and prior. As the DivX Certified program launched we faced an uphill battle amongst the technology purists who wanted the most complete MPEG-4 ASP implementations possible, yet if we had gone that route actual hardware would only have been available years later, there would be less choice, it would cross fewer device categories and devices would have been far more expensive slowing the growth of the platform and reducing the value for those adopting the format.

Dark Shikari is correct that our draft profile currently specifies level 4.0 but the subsets/constraints we're choosing are not "somewhat-arbitrary", they're the result of ongoing discussions with our partners to determine what the DivX 7 ecosystem might look like depending on the constraints that we set. As DS mentioned, level 4.0 is one constraint that will lead to content interoperability across the set top box market.

Originally Posted by Neillithan

We've seen Quicktime boast H.264 playback only to support a very limited range of AVC potential.

Apple do not have to worry about interoperability too much. You encode for your iPhone, or your iPod, or your AppleTV. The content doesn't really move beyond that walled environment. All of these devices, btw, support different profiles/levels than one another.

Originally Posted by Neillithan

Now DivX has an opportunity to revolutionize HD video, but will they? Will they further diversify videos or will they be the driving force .mkv needs?

I think we're going to offer very much the same value proposition that we did in previous generations of DivX. As a content creator you always have choices before you and perhaps an over-simplification of the traditional problem comes down to this:

• I have HD video to distribute
• I can encode it using the best possible settings and mainly constrain its use to the desktop, or
• I can lose 1-2% of the best possible efficiency, still have it look absolutely nose-to-screen perfect, but have it work on hundreds, perhaps thousands of devices, no problem.

Is it a big sacrifice to make versus the long-term benefit gained? I'd like to know that a year or two down the road the content I'm investing my time encoding and distributing today is going to be playable anywhere by anyone with no crazy conversion processes involved. I'd like my brother, sister, mother, and friends to be able to go into a store and pick something off the shelf for $100 or less and be able to watch all the files I've sent them in past with no problems.

Originally Posted by leeperry

basically DivX Networks cashed in bigtime on divx3(stolen asf dll from m$), and now they wanna cash in on MKV pirate movies.

DivX wants to create interoperability of content and devices. We want to work with hundreds of manufacturers to do that so that you can move your content between your video camera to your desktop to your DVD player and so on. We want to make sure that the experience you have on these devices is consistently good so that content creators can be assured that their viewership will have a great experience with their media.

Originally Posted by Dark Shikari

But DivX7 doesn't. It only supports SRT and SSA, and furthermore--it only supports completely unformatted subtitles, so its really no better than TTXT.

No, the beta version of DivX Player 7 doesn't support formatting, yet