Looking for reasons for switching codecs

[abtm]

I know that I am probably going to get flamed for this post, but I want to assure everyone up front that I am not trying to start a flame war, merely to ask a serious question.

I have been very happy with the DIVX 4 codec and have a vast library of titles archived in that codec. I have been following DIVX 5 and XVID for some time but every time I think about switching codecs I ask myself why? What benefits would I receive? I know there can be issues keeping both DIVX 4 and DIVX 5 on the same PC.

Furthermore, there now seems to be talk of DVD players that can also play MPEG4 movies. From my past experience, I know that emulators or decoders are usually rolled out for older formats first. Doesn't that imply that when those new technologies are released they will be more likely to play DIVX 4 than DIVX 5 or XVID?

In short, I am reluctant to change from a CODEC that I am comfortable with until I can be sure that I will not lose anything by switching.

[theReal]

If you're a fan of Divx 4, there's no reason why you shouldn't switch to Divx 5, but there are some reasons why you should:

- b-frames provide much better compression at the same quality
- Divx 5 has improved sharpness over Divx 4 (so much that I finally switched over from Divx 3.11)
- the Divx 5 playback filter is great for all Divx content and has some nice extra features like the "film-effect" which can improve bad encodes.

If you're worrying about mpeg4 compatibility, you should definitely switch to Divx 5 - the Divx 5 pro encoder already has an option to produce mpeg4 compatible files. As far as I know, Divx 5 is by now the most mpeg4 compatible codec if you don't enable gmc and q-pel (Xvid developers please forgive me if I'm wrong!)

IMO, Divx 4 is deader than dead - what you can argue about is if Divx 5 is already better than Nandub SBC (for me, it is), but Divx 4 is out.

Xvid is definitely a great open source project, but I'm personally not yet really sure what its future will be. It's just like the question if you should use Linux and abandon Windows - on the one hand you should, but Windows also has some nice features and everybody is using it, so...
It sometimes makes me feel bad to use commercial stuff instead of open source, but ... ;)