Is Apple rolling out the welcome mat for XviD? Probably not. XviD has made it to the QuickTime Components listing over at QuickTime’s resources page. Xvid of course is one of the more popular video compression formats out there, with most torrents coming in this variety.

We believe that the adding of Xvid was simply based on the codecs popularity, and the immediate AppleTV hack to support the format. With this codec you can now properly export your XviD movies to a more Apple friendly M4V format.

Whoever updated the site, forgot to change the logo to point to XviD’s site rather than DIVX!

We meet people on the various IPTV, mobile TV and web video circuits who always comment that VC-1, after a flying start, has fallen back and that pretty much these days the codec of choice is either VP6 from On2 Technologies for web video and H.264 for everything else, with no VC-1 in sight.

Just over three weeks ago the MPGE LA issued a final license for the Microsoft-inaugurated VC-1 codec, after forming a group to assess essential patents and to discuss terms for it, back in March 2004, the process taking precisely three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On April 26, 2007, Apple sent out short notices to their iTunes partners who provide the music content to the iTunes store. The notices let partners know that they would soon be able to offer DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to customers through iTunes. Read the rest of this entry »

An experimental Apple TV extension was added in build 3678. As I don’t have an Apple TV on hand, no testing can be done. The parameters are coded with the spec available on the Internet. So feedback needed.

In the same build, the iPod extension was rewritte to provide more adjustable options.

Sometimes we need to encode with VFW codecs (mainly closed-source codecs which only comes in the form of VFW codecs). A scratch VFW encoder backend has been added to MediaCoder. To encode with VFW codecs, follow these steps:

• Set Backend to “VFW Encoder” on video tab (you need to first uncheck the Auto Select option on the right)
• Click the Backend button, in the Settings dialog, enter the name of codec DLL file.
• When VFW Encoder set as backend, Video Format option has no effect.
• You can set the path of compdata file or simply leave it free and this will bring out the configuration dialog of VFW codec.

Please note that encoding with VFW in MediaCoder is just AS-IS and may not work at all with some codecs. So don’t complain.