Can You Get Flash Without Adobe? Meet DivX Plus Web Player

Features
By Andrew Ku
published

DivX Plus Web Player is the first alternative to Adobe's Flash Player. It promises better performance, battery life, and video quality, all in one shot. If Flash content brings your computer to its knees, read on to find out if DivX is the answer.

DivX Plus Web Player: How It Works

The HiQ browser plug-in is the component of the DivX Plus Web Player that enables playback of Flash-encoded video. Together, they claim to offer improved performance, battery life, and quality thanks to what the company considers a more robust video engine.

Flash Playback with Divx Hiq


However, many Web sites still require you to have Flash installed for HiQ to function properly. For that reason, DivX isn't necessarily providing a Flash substitute. It's more like a companion and alternative rolled into to. Whenever you visit a Flash-enabled Web site supported by DivX, you see a separate playback bar, as in the image above.


On its forum, DivX writes, "Think of HiQ as coming in and swapping out Flash video for DivX." However, this isn't completely accurate. We used a custom server script to detect the content requested by the browser. We found that DivX uses the same video session ID to request the same Flash file as Adobe's Flash Player. So, it's actually better to think about this as two separate video players like Windows Media Player and VLC. DivX is simply playing the same video file on a different video player.

Requested by Adobe Flash Player: http://v24.lscache3.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?sparams=id%2Cexpire%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Cratebypass%2Coc%3AU0hPRldRVV9FSkNOOV9PS1lD&fexp=904410&itag=22&ipbits=0&signature=C67EFAEFD84F4B43029D4C053DCD958BE12C93C2.A5B74AA09069EDE6A4C53087BBEF6E4A4739C472&sver=3&ratebypass=yes&expire=1301767200&key=yt1&ip=0.0.0.0&id=d6ec8ce3f6bdb7aa&begin=4673

Requested by DivX HiQ: http://v24.lscache3.c.youtube.com:80/videoplayback?sparams=id%2Cexpire%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Cratebypass%2Coc%3AU0hPRldRVV9FSkNOOV9PS1lD&fexp=904410&itag=22&ipbits=0&signature=C67EFAEFD84F4B43029D4C053DCD958BE12C93C2.A5B74AA09069EDE6A4C53087BBEF6E4A4739C472&sver=3&ratebypass=yes&expire=1301767200&key=yt1&ip=0.0.0.0&id=d6ec8ce3f6bdb7aa

Currently, there’s no way to load directly into the DivX player. You must first load the content into Adobe's Flash Player before DivX HiQ can detect it. That's why the DivX browser bar appears after Adobe's Flash Player is loaded.

Andrew Ku
19 Comments Comment from the forums
  • henydiah
    one of challenges of adobe flash player, i hope this can support my mobile
    Reply
  • The Halo Don
    Useful! I'll take it!
    Reply
  • Does not work in chrome
    Reply
  • so according to the title, divx can do the same funcionality as a whole, regarding flash plugin?

    can it be programmable, you can make animations, games, applications with divx player?


    or does the text admit that flash is only about video? so adobe is pushing a whole software just to play video on browsers?


    to the dear writer of this report, please understand that tom´s hardware is a long standing website, and it conquered the credibility of millions of people around the world, so be more carefull next time you wanna write a sensationalist title to bring people to your text.


    flash does a lot more than playing video. and there´s no such thing as "flash video"... video is VIDEO, no matter played by flash, html5, "bleep-blam-bloom technology", whatever else.

    and the day you have so many calculations and big chunks of scenery, characters, audio, and server liasons, you´ll have an impact in the system, no matter if its flash, html5, or anyother app.

    magic doesnt happen out of flash. data weights anyway it comes, and theres no guarantee that producers are the best for their jobs, by working with optimizations in many levels of production.

    simply theres no guarantee at all, so expect a heavy ugly bad optimized html5 applications in the future, that will impact on browser´s performance anytime sooner or later.
    Reply
  • Soul_keeper
    I'm not impressed
    adobe may suck, but divx isn't much better as far as openness goes.

    Star Trek on cbs is an absolute annoyance to watch ...
    My gnash plugin don't work there
    Reply
  • dark_lord69
    mayankleoboy1i wont use IE8 instead of FF to save any amount of battery.Why not use IE9? Toms found it to be one of the fastest browsers...
    Yes, IE 8 is slow...
    Reply
  • gm0n3y
    While its great to have an alternative to flash, without support for the latest browsers (IE9, FF4, and most importantly for me Chrome) its not going to spread very far.
    Reply
  • ph0b0s123
    Wow, what a puff piece. About that software came out over 6 months ago. Even the graph which is supposed to show how much better this software is for playing flash shows that CPU utilisation is the same if not worse than without. The article did also not mention that most have binned this version of divx player and gone back to older versions due to the amount of crashes the software causes in browsers. Cannot believe 6 pages was spent on this.

    And while I am complaining, cause normally I love the site, it's very annoying that comments I leave on the UK site don't appear on the US site, and visa versa. Can understand when a site is in a completely different language but Brits and Yanks can talk to each other yer know.
    Reply
  • computertech82
    It's an article i already know about, but i've found divx CRASHES by ie8 browswer. While an OLDER version, doesn't.
    Only if they fix the program to run stable, will i use it. I don't need something that doesn't work most of the time.
    Reply
  • People still use Internet Explorer?

    mayakleoboy & ph0b0s123: +1 and +1
    Reply