What's the big deal with DivX 3.11?

[Meestor_X]

I see a lot of people complaining when a hardware MPEG-4 player doesn't support DivX 3.11, even if it supports DivX 4 & 5 perfectly well.

What does DivX 3.11 have that DivX 5 doesn't?

[bond]

divx3 is not mpeg-4 compliant, saying these there are many differences decoding-wise compared to mpeg-4 compliant codecs, like divx4/5, xvid, 3ivx aso...

[Meestor_X]

Ok, but why does anyone still use an older codec like that?

[bond]

because it was for a long time the best codec and therefore many people did many encodes with it and they still want to watch these old encodes i assume

[JaTeMaTec]

Originally posted by bond
because it was for a long time the best codec and therefore many people did many encodes with it and they still want to watch these old encodes i assume

+Addition : They could just recode them to DivX 5.x, 3ivx 4.x or XviD 2.x - all three are known to work fine with the latest (flashable) home (CD/DVD) MPEG4 players, but the issue is : the recoding (=decode and encode to a new format) would make about 25-35 percent loss of quality with the movie (sound would be ok i quess) and many ppl just don't want to watch a scratchy granular movie with eye-glasses on to see more clearly :)

Most new hw players are compatible with the following formats :
• DivX 4.02 etc
• DivX V5 standard (and up)
• DivX V5 PRO (and up) (Restrictions with Quarter Pixel options)
• RMP4 V 1.0 et V 1.1
• XviD V 2.10 (Restrictions with Quarter Pixel options)
* 3ivX v 4.0 and up (Not all players)

Here's one example page with specs (H&B players):
http://www.hb-direct.com/uk/faqdivx.html

JaTeMaTec