Comments

watson wrote on 1/1/2003, 2:47 PM
No.
Do a search on Divx. You will find a lot of discussion on the topic.

W
BillyBoy wrote on 1/1/2003, 5:30 PM
You can open some but not all. You can open more in VitualDub or try one of the DivX players: http://www.divx.com/movies/

If you're downloading DivX off the web, or especially from newsgroups it is fairly common for one or more parts to be missing. That isn't necessarily a problem. The trouble is unlike a MPEG that has header info at the start of a file, a AVI has it at the end. So if you're missing a part it won't play in most players. That can be fixed by repairing the index with something like Avifixed. Which is what I used to put together a few random parts I used for my mini-music video I posted over at Kelly's site awhile ago.
msorrels wrote on 1/3/2003, 3:17 PM
It seems the Divx and Xvid codecs don't work with Vegas at all. Divx will be recognized but all the frames are black. XVid avi's aren't even recognized at all. Since Xvid has source code available it wasn't that hard to fix so that it would work with Vegas. The Vfw wrapper has a minor bug(which is why the video stream isn't recognized) and wants to return the video only as a YUV stream, which Vegas doesn't seem to like. My modified version has a few issues still(RGB performance is too slow, more code is needed to make the wrapper support both formats) but I suspect Divx and Xvid (and perhaps Open Divx) codecs could be fixed to be Vegas friendly. Sadly with the patent issues surrounding Xvid and any of these MPEG4 codecs, no one in the US can safely touch these "GPLed" guys without running the risk of being sued. The good news is that it's not Vegas, but the codecs that need to be changed. The bad news is that since the codecs work for media player I'm not sure anyone working on them care about apps like Vegas.

From the tests I did the best compression/quality codec like Divx that does work out of the box with Vegas is On2 Technologies' VP3. Which isn't that bad and produces fairly decent files.
discdude wrote on 1/3/2003, 7:34 PM
msorrels,

You sound like you know about programming codecs. Can you recommend any books, tutorials, websites, etc that can teach me about codec programming?
msorrels wrote on 1/5/2003, 2:58 PM
There really isn't a lot on this, mainly because it's not exactly a mainstream task. If you think about it there are less than a few hundred codecs ever written at all. Not really a subject with a lot of "how to" info. Microsoft obviously has examples(but they are rather poor). The Huffy codec has source code available which is nice(since it handles much of the colorspace issues codecs should deal with) http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html But looking for more than that your out of luck. Codec programming really isn't that hard, codecs are very simple (the interface between them and windows) the real trick is in the how to actually compress and manage the video(or audio) stream. That's the real meat of it. There are some books on MPEG/video but none I'd recommend except to the very serious.

I'd caution that codec programming isn't really an "intro to programming" kind of task. Unlike most types of programs, codecs are very unfriendly to unexperienced programmers since they involve pushing data around in a major way, using little to no memory(codecs that allocate ram while processing have aweful performace). It's not exactly the type of programming someone without a lot of experience with memory and processing of memory should try. Also the spec for how a codec works is mainly historical. The documentation for codec writers and for apps that use them isn't very clear on things. As a result how a codec needs to work is very fuzzy. Makes for issues like what we are seeing with Vegas and the Divx and Xvid codecs. The Huffy source has a number of interesting comments about work around he had to do to make Premiere happy.

Sorry I couldn't really be of more help.