More on DivX 5.0 Pro

[Slava]

I've never before bought any of the software on the net but I figured DivX 5.0 Pro was deserving. I just bought DivX 5.0 Pro for $30.00 and I was hoping to benefit from all of its advanced features. In many cases when I enable those features or modify some of the feature settings I run into problems (CRASHES). DO I FEEL STUPID (!!!) No more buying of any kind of sharewares and stuff like DivX for me. If you get a cracked version of something and it sux, just delete it and get on with your life, but I am really pissed that I paid $30 for DivX 5.0.

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General problems with DivX 5.0 Pro:
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1. Descriptions of Several Divx 5.0 Pro features are wrong. The descriptions reflect what should be, not what is. For example, DivX 5.0 Pro team claim:

"We have tested DivX 5.0 interoperability with Abode Premiere, VirtualDub, FlaskMPEG, and Gordian Knot. So keep using your existing applications and you'll get all the new features of DivX 5.0..."

I don't know about FlaskMPEG, and Gordian Knot (haven't tested these yet) but I guarantee you that selecting DivX 5.0 Pro in any version of Premiere crashes Premiere instantly and that modifying any of the default DivX 5.0 Pro settings while using it with VirtualDub crashes VirtualDub the moment you click "Save AVI".

2. If DivX 5.0 Pro is selected, it is futile to try to capture video with ASUS Live (capture software that ships with one of the most popular and one of the best GeForce 3 cards). Every other frame is dropped and the output is filled with bright green vertical lines and there is no sound.

3. There are other misrepresented facts, such as certain features which are said to reduce file size actually increase file size slightly.

4. There is no direct link to DivX 5.0 Pro user guide anywhere on the site. The user guide is only accessible from the link in DivX 5.0 Pro program folder. What if I am not at home and want to review something from a PC which does not have DivX 5.0 Pro installed?

5. "How to..." guides available only on the DivX site are sort of okay in a limited sort of way but there is nothing there about DivX 5.0 Pro.

6. There is NO troubleshooting section and I could not find in the support section ANY answers to ANY of the problems I am having while using DivX 5.0 Pro with Premiere, ASUS Live and VirtualDub (Let me ask you: what kind of "support" is this?)

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Specific problems with DivX 5.0 Pro:
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For my tests I used a very good quality, uncompressed 50 Mb 640x480 24-second long video clip with CD-quality Audio captured from Composite source with ASUS V8200T5 Ti-500 GeForce3 card. My PC is Pentium-4, 1800MHz on ASUS P4T-E motherboard with 512MB PC-800 RDRAM and SB-Live! X-gamer)

In short, most of the features, when used together with other features, crash VirtualDub.

In detail:

1. According to DivX 5.0 Pro user guide a 2-pass encoding is supposed to give you great compression AND the best possible quality (better than 1-pass anyway). Indeed, all other settings equal, 2-pass output is half the size of 1-pass output, but if you compare the same video clip done in 1-pass (quality based) with the final output of the second pass of the 2-pass process, the 2-pass quality is not just bad, it is simply TERRIBLE - blocky, noisy and full of small garbage and visual artifacts. What's up with that?

This is a catch 22 situation: if I compress using 2-pass (to reduce size) and then try to filter out the noise and artifacts I will have to “Save AVI” with VirtualDub again and I will have to recompress the clip degrading the quality even further!

2. If I enable DivX 5.0 GMC and/or Bi-directional Encoding the sound is always out of sync regardless of 1-pass or 2-pass setting.

3. If I enable DivX 5.0 Basic Video Deinterlace (All frames progressive) VirtualDub always crashes.

4. Choosing any MPEG Layer-3 format while using DivX 5.0 Pro video compression crashes VirtualDub.

I tried various combinations of features with ALL VirtualDub filters enabled/disabled and with/without compressing the Audio . This did not help much – these problems are not sporadic but chronic.

VirtualDub filters I typically use:

Deinterlace (blend)
Denoise (RGB)
TV (3x3)
Blur (by 1)
Levels
Hue/Saturation/Intensity

There are, of course, other probelms with DivX 5.0 and its support such as if you cannot resolve a probelm and, in desperation, you email to the support team you will get an automated response saying, in essence that we will not get back to you because there are too may of you and too few of us.

I cannot believe Tom's review gave DivX 5.0 thumbs up...

 

[siliconjon]

That sure was a big post...

Don't know what ya said, as I'm too busy to spend much time here today, but I did want to post that I just installed Divx5 on my slow machine, as the real deal is down until I get a new motherboard, and nothing plays right on the P3 anymore. After putting in the Divx5, my videos freeze, or look horribly choppy, and if I don't have the quality turned almost all the way down, things get pathetically out of sync (though even with it turned up, DivX4 looked better). Probably not a fair evaluation testing codec5 on videos encoded with 4? Seems to me this shouldn't happen, though, as I did have 4 installed, and if 5 is incapable of decoding 4, then it should be using 4 to decode those files, eh?


If I don't get my 90THz AMD Quadraplex system soon, I'm afraid I may just combust right here.

 

[Tiberius13]

A couple Q's for you Slava...

My initial setup had divx 3.11 alpha installed... and then divx 4 installed where I choose to NOT have divx 4 take over for divx 3.11. In my codecs list I had low-motion divx, high motion divx, and divx 4 (if I recall correctly).

After I installed divx 5, my selections because low motion divx 4, high motion divx 4, and divx 5??

low motion and high motion were divx 3.11 codecs as I recall?????? So this confused the hell outta me. As I had to cap and convert something and only had 10 minutes before the show started, I went for the one thing that would ensure I had my divx 3.11 low motion divx codec available: I uninstalled all divx codecs, then re-installed divx 3.11

Strangely... the 2 options this left me with were low motion divx 4 and high motion divx 4 ?

It seems installing divx 5 altered something so that divx 3.11 low and high motion codecs now had divx 4 in their name????? Anyways... I did the cap using low motion divx 4, and so far it seems that it is the same as it always was (I hope)

Additionally! Has anyone noticed a different quality of playback on files encoded using previous versions of divx since installing divx 5?? In particular, I was watching a file encoded with low motion divx (divx 3.11 alpha) and I swear it looked worse after I put divx 5 on my machine.... (at least with divx 4 you had the choice during the install to not have divx 4 take over for divx 3.11 files)

Since the damage seems to be done on my system from the original divx 5 install, I'm going to try putting it back on and I'll play around with it a bit.... but I don't like that it tinkered with my previous versions of divx at all....

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