Is XVID still used?

[GAP]

I know that there are people who had moved to greener pastures but are there still users who still used this codec? Or should I just say my eulogy before moving on to more advanced encoders?

[StainlessS]

Apparently so,
quite often, in this [where this is posted, ie MPEG-4 ASP] forum, there are way - way more forum visitors than anywhere else on the D9,
so yes, ASP/XVID/DIVX is still quite popular, but I cannot say nor understand why.

EDIT:
Right now, in forum "MPEG-4 AVC / H.264" there are 10 Viewing,
in this MPEG-4 ASP forum, there are 87 Viewing, it beats me why it is still so popular,
especially given the very significant quality difference for a given filesize.
[I guess many still use hardware players from pre-Android era].

[Liisachan]

I use Xvid as a quick way to get the list of scene-change frames (as the list of keyframes). Keyframes from x264 are not so simple as those used in Xvid (a scene-change may not be a keyframe). The list is then used to programmatically detect subtitle end-time overruns (bleed) and underruns, start-time overruns and underruns.

I also use Xvid for test-encoding and checking when typesetting a moving sign, because it's quicker. For similar reasons, I sometimes use Xvid.avi for typesetting in general, rather than e.g. using x264.mkv via ffms2.dll. Xvid is quicker and not using much memory.

Although, personally I no longer use Xvid as the codec for final encoding, it's still convenient for me for various purposes. There are many countries in the world, and some people are still using older CPU for various reasons. Such users may prefer Xvid.avi, as newer codecs might be too CPU-intensive for them.

[GAP]

I used to XVID a lot in my encodes until I learned of better methods and even then I did not change that easily. I am slowly transitioning to other codecs for my encodes but I still have a fondness of XVID due to low disk space and general ease-of-use. I used it for my encodes in the past but I am starting to move on to other encoders as I want to "keep up with the times."

Although, personally I no longer use Xvid as the codec for final encoding, it's still convenient for me for various purposes. There are many countries in the world, and some people are still using older CPU for various reasons. Such users may prefer Xvid.avi, as newer codecs might be too CPU-intensive for them.

Sad but true. Unfortunately I did not own high end, super advanced computers for gaming and recently editing but they were competent for me to at use programs like Virtualdub, PowerDirector, Resolve, etc. at least.

[hello_hello]

Originally Posted by StainlessS

Right now, in forum "MPEG-4 AVC / H.264" there are 10 Viewing,
in this MPEG-4 ASP forum, there are 87 Viewing, it beats me why it is still so popular

It's probably not so much the codec that's popular, but a new post/thread in the ASP forum isn't too common, so maybe the forum equivalent of rubber-necking was causing some temporary congestion.

[StainlessS]

Right now 19 in AVC forum and 67 in ASP forum, nearly always the same.
A few months ago [maybe] PoisonDeathRay pointed out something like 650 online in ASP forum, its uncanny

EDIT: OK, maybe more than a couple of months ago [2018]

Originally Posted by poisondeathray

what's going on here ? There are about 1000 users on when I took this (right now), and ~60% are viewing mpeg4-asp ??

EDIT: I'm guessin' that they all just curious to see what everybody else is lookin' at.
EDIT: Arh, you already said that.

forum equivalent of rubber-necking

[FranceBB]

That's odd... but hey, apparently there are still people using it for... compatibility purposes?
I don't know...
Besides, I thought MPEG-2 was far more common than Xvid, not just for DVDs that are still being produced for some odd reason, but also for all the SD 480i or 576i TV channels out there that are still on air and also HD/FULL HD standards like XDCAM which just don't wanna die...
It feels weird to talk about these things in 2021, but hey, they're still a thing...

[Liisachan]

It's not uncommon for a subbing group to do double or triple releases - the same content both as HD x264 and as SD xvid, for example. Which means, significantly many people still prefer xvid versions. I don't really know why, but I know this as a fact first hand - the download count may be like 2:1 or 3:1. (I suspect some of them are "file collectors", getting both versions "just in case").

Xvid may not be better in visual quality but it does have its forte. It's lightweight, tried and tested, player-side is always ready. Have you ever tried for example x264 with output color space 422 or 444 or even RGB? I don't think player-side is always ready yet if you use not-so-common options. Of course that does not mean newer codecs are bad - they're good and loved. But do we have to disrespect xvid just because we use newer codecs? Like, MP3 is still popular, even though there are Vorbis, AAC, Opus.

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by Liisachan

It's not uncommon for a subbing group to do double or triple releases - the same content both as HD x264 and as SD xvid, for example.

True, I've seen fansubbers do that a lot...

Originally Posted by Liisachan

Xvid may not be better in visual quality but it does have its forte. It's lightweight, tried and tested, player-side is always ready. Have you ever tried for example x264 with output color space 422 or 444 or even RGB? I don't think player-side is always ready yet if you use not-so-common options.

Well, long time ago if you were using something like --ref 16, --me esa --subme 11 --preset placebo and reverse upscale to 1280x720 with 4:4:4 10bit, it was really hard to play 'cause it would have been CPU only with no GPU hardware acceleration and pretty heavy for the CPUs we had at the time, but nowadays we no longer live in an era in which 4c/8th Intel i7 were priced as gold, they could barely bear the load and AMD CPUs were not really usable... I mean, we've come a long way since then...
Still, I understand the "legacy" thing and the fact that most groups have been doing SD releases in Xvid since... well... forever and they're still doing it, so... fair enough.

Originally Posted by Liisachan

Of course that does not mean newer codecs are bad - they're good and loved. But do we have to disrespect xvid just because we use newer codecs? Like, MP3 is still popular, even though there are Vorbis, AAC, Opus.

MP3 is a different thing: it's so bad that even MPEG actually begged users to please stop using it a few years ago. I mean, it was ok for primitive devices, portable MP3 players I used to use when I was a young lad and I was going to school, listening with crappy old earphones, but I mean, nowadays AAC is widely supported everywhere: smartphones, cars, stereos etc. It's so supported that it's the de facto standard for DAB and DAB+, so I would very much like AAC to be adopted by everyone and I would love to see MP3 die once and for all. It's a crappy codec with a crappy psychoacustic model based on the filterbank polyphase that just has to die and has no meaningful use case in the modern world...

[Liisachan]

Okay, MP3 may not be a great example here. (However, although people say MP3 is bad and that is true in some sense, when double-blind-tested, maybe 99% of them can't ABX Lossless vs. MP3 @ 160, even @ 128. At least I can't...) Anyway, back when DivX was rather common, and coming with a bunch of unwanted bloatware, Xvid devs were stoically providing free (as in freedom), clean codec, even though there were potential legal/patent complications too. At least that's how I remember it. Newer codecs are great, yes, but we don't need to be disrespectful, especially given that Xvid is still useful in some limited areas...

[Katie Boundary]

Compatibility > efficiency

Every time.

Every. Goddamn. Time.

[hello_hello]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

MP3 is a different thing: it's so bad that even MPEG actually begged users to please stop using it a few years ago. I mean, it was ok for primitive devices, portable MP3 players I used to use when I was a young lad and I was going to school, listening with crappy old earphones, but I mean, nowadays AAC is widely supported everywhere: smartphones, cars, stereos etc. It's so supported that it's the de facto standard for DAB and DAB+, so I would very much like AAC to be adopted by everyone and I would love to see MP3 die once and for all. It's a crappy codec with a crappy psychoacustic model based on the filterbank polyphase that just has to die and has no meaningful use case in the modern world...

Today's youth.... no idea how good they have it.
When I was young and going to school, my portable music player looked very much like this:



Mind you that's way more fancy than the one I owned because FM radio didn't exist and the Cue function was, if I remember correctly, a manually implemented feature involving holding the play button half way down while fast-forwarding and hoping it wouldn't end in tears. The only psychoacoustic model I was aware of when I went to school involved a portable player's lack of Dolby B to make pre-recorded cassettes sound brighter.
Ahhh... how I fondly remember performing regular maintenance on my player's storage medium with a hexadecimal pencil.



Seriously though....
The folks at hydrogen audio are confident the LAME MP3 encoder is transparent using the default VBR mode, despite MP3's limitations,
https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.ph...coder_settings
which makes me happy because my current MP3 player doesn't support AAC and a quick google indicates Cowon's latest players still don't support it. I assume they've decided to save themselves the licence fee.

You've inspired me to start a new thread on portable players though, as I'm considering the possibility of contemplating upgrading mine, but rather than sidetrack this thread any further I'll start a new one in the General forum.

[StainlessS]

because FM radio didn't exist

Wow, you must be ancient
When I was a kid, my mother had [in the kitchen] a 5 band radio that had FM, and could pick up airplanes, taxi's, police, and even TV audio.

EDIT:

FM broadcasting is a method of radio broadcasting using frequency modulation (FM). Invented in 1933 by American engineer Edwin Armstrong

FM broadcasting[wikipedia]:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcasting

EDIT: When I was about 12, my little brother turned a joke into a pretend competition letter [in a kids comic],
star letter prize was a nifty leather cased, 3 band transistor radio. [long/short/medium wave, no FM]
He said his little borther [Ie, me, his big brother] had come home from his first day at school crying, when asked why he [I] said
that he was told he was gonna get free school dinners, but he only got one. [free <-> three - he won, I shoulda had half ownership I think]

EDIT: Some years later, the same brother ended up fixing TV's and Radios for a company which did servicng for a big well known
corporation [was owned by same corp]. The major share of repairs was on radios, and they charged £18.00 + parts as standard charge.
The vast majoirty of problems was dud battery, so he spent a lot of the day just inserting new batteries and charging £18.00 + the
price of the batteries. Easy money. [quite a sum about 1975]

EDIT: Also, you could use a BIC biro pen instead of a hexagonal pencil to swizzle a cassette.

EDIT: And the first mobile phone call was about 75 years ago [demo'ed June 17 1946, first hand held in 1973]:- https://metro.co.uk/2021/06/21/mobil...time-14790880/

EDIT: One guy I went camping with when about 14YO, had a battery operated record player, never seen one like it before nor since.
EDIT: Not sure, I think the record player worked kinda like a bread toaster [just for singles, not LP's].

[GMJCZP]

I still use Fhg MP3 with BeHappy and Adobe Audition. Because? because at 128 kbps CBR is preferable to Lame, but I admit that the latter should be more efficient according to what hello_hello says. My preference for CBR is from the times of VirtualDubMod and muxing avi video with mp3 audio, this program recommends not using MP3 VBR but MP3 CBR to prevent a desynchronization, but I recently took an mp4 video and converted it into avi xvid and the audio with lame converted it to three audios: CBR, ABR and VBR. These three equal XVID videos I tested on my LG DVK-9713N and curiously I noticed that the videos with ABR and VBR audio did not get out of sync, which made me think that if I had encoded in VBR in a series that I edited a while ago in XVID the audio would have been better, since, imagine, it was 56 kbps CBR, anyway it was an extreme compression test, it is a series of 56 chapters to 28 chapters per 4.7 GB DVD.

Edit: that radio photo reminded me of my defunct Silver Crown recorder, those 80's...

[Blue_MiSfit]

Originally Posted by Katie Boundary

Compatibility > efficiency

Every time.

Every. Goddamn. Time.

Agreed! But H.264 hardware decode is utterly commonplace on any device shipped in the last decade.

I know there's a pool of legacy devices (especially outside of the biggest / wealthiest countries), but this will continue to dwindle down.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

but I mean, nowadays AAC is widely supported everywhere: smartphones, cars, stereos etc. It's so supported that it's the de facto standard for DAB and DAB+, so I would very much like AAC to be adopted by everyone...

Here in the UK all BBC radio stations and many major commercial radio stations still use basic DAB (MPEG-1 Layer 2)!

The adoption of DAB+ (HE-AAC) has been very slow and sloppy here, primarily due to the quantity of early DAB radio adoptees who's devices don't support DAB+...

[hello_hello]

Originally Posted by StainlessS

Wow, you must be ancient
When I was a kid, my mother had [in the kitchen] a 5 band radio that had FM, and could pick up airplanes, taxi's, police, and even TV audio.

EDIT:

FM broadcasting[wikipedia]:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcasting

It would have been more accurate to say nobody was broadcasting.
I don't think my portable player had an FM receiver, but the first... cough... Hi Fi system I owned did. Remember when a Hi Fi system was made up of individual components? You bought an amplifier, a tuner, a turntable, a cassette player etc, but at some stage manufactures started combining them into "3-in-1" units. They eased us into it though by putting everything in a single box and designing it so it still looked like individual components, but wasn't. My first Hi Fi system was one of those. It did have an FM receiver but for the first year or so there weren't any FM stations broadcasting.

Apparently EON FM launched sometime during the year I turned 16. I would have said it was a couple of years later, but Wikipedia says it wasn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeli...adio#1980-1989

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by SeeMoreDigital

Here in the UK all BBC radio stations and many major commercial radio stations still use basic DAB (MPEG-1 Layer 2)!

OMG! MP2?! Really?

Originally Posted by SeeMoreDigital

The adoption of DAB+ (HE-AAC) has been very slow and sloppy here, primarily due to the quantity of early DAB radio adoptees who's devices don't support DAB+...

I see...

Originally Posted by hello_hello

Today's youth.... no idea how good they have it.
When I was young and going to school, my portable music player looked very much like this:

LOL "portable" xD

Originally Posted by hello_hello

Mind you that's way more fancy than the one I owned because FM radio didn't exist and the Cue function was, if I remember correctly, a manually implemented feature involving holding the play button half way down while fast-forwarding and hoping it wouldn't end in tears.

FM didn't exist? (O_O)
Wow... I think about FM as something that has always been there... You guys must have been amazed by the sound quality when you moved from LW and MW to AM and FM ehehehehehehe

Originally Posted by Blue_MiSfit

H.264 hardware decode is utterly commonplace on any device shipped in the last decade.

Exactly, which is why I find very odd the fact that some devices still don't have it...

I mean, we're here talking about H.266 VVC getting ready soon-ish and there are people still encoding in XVID... It definitely makes you wonder...

[StainlessS]

FranceBB,

You guys must have been amazed by the sound quality when you moved from LW and MW to AM and FM ehehehehehehe

LW and MW (& SW) are AM (Amplitude Modulated).

HH,

Apparently EON FM launched sometime during the year I turned 16.

Switch on here in UK was in 1955:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_b...ting_in_the_UK
I guess in Australa, take up was delayed as FM is more suited to short range, and Australia being Australia, would find longer range more useful.

Legal commercial broadcasting began in the United Kingdom in 1973, with the launch of LBC

although there were 'Pirate" radio stations before that.

EDIT: Radio Caroline and Radio Luxemburg being two, I think.
Caroline:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline
Luxemburg:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Luxembourg
Pirate Radio:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio

[FranceBB]

I didn't know LBC was so old!
I've been listening to Nick Ferrari for politics every now and then and also to Mr James O' Bryan Mystery Hour to which I also participated once in 2015 to say "It's a question, James" xD