Are there any? - besides the very crude guidelines of codec type allowed and no. of CDs vs. movie duration?

I came across a couple of XViD releases that wouldn't play on a recently released DivX player. After analysing them it seemed that the reason why I was unable to play these releases was due to the fact that the movie was encoded using an MPEG Custom quantization matrix. Not all players support this and it certainly doesn't form part of the "DivX certified for Home Theatre" accreditation requirements (you can check this out using Dr DivX, try and encode a file using the Home Theatre profile and you'll see you're locked into using the H.263 quantization matrix).

Now, I'm not sure what release scene rules are enforced these days but if its TDX2002, then theres no mention of any such requirement to use default H.263 or MPEG matrices when encoding.

It would be nice to see releases work with commercial player offerings, but the current state of play makes it very easy for release groups to pander to the latest features available in their preferred codec (sometimes for little visual gains particularly on 2CD releases) - so it would seem necessary that some encoding guidelines need to be set in stone or we'll continue to see releases the work on some devices and not on others.

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DivX-playing hardware itself is far from standardized. Why not make phone calls to all the electronics companies out there demanding that they adopt some standards? It'd be more effective than advocating for scene rules changes on a forum that nobody in the scene reads.

Release groups have enough to worry about without satisfying every person's particular preferred machine's idiosyncracies. All scene DivX releases play just fine on my computer, from which I can feed S-Video, DVI, or VGA output to any number of televisions or big screen projectors.

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well maybe a new standard should go in effect, if it will play on a standalone, it'll play on teh pc and everyone is happy.

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quote:

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Originally posted by horizonstar
DivX-playing hardware itself is far from standardized. Why not make phone calls to all the electronics companies out there demanding that they adopt some standards?

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tdx2005 rules:

if it works....rock
if it doesn't, beat it with a stick

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Well I was expecting someone to chime in with "well such-and-such hardware player will play MPEG-4 ASP", or "my Xbox plays everything I throw at it".


Basically, DivX rips have been around a lot longer than hardware players, scene rules were compiled for playback on a PC, if you wanted to play on a standalone you would download the SVCD instead. I guess until hardware players catch up, this is still the case.

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Just found out my dvd player does kvcd... whoodathunkit?

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Thanks for those who responded with useful comments - I found an article which discusses Xvid interoperability for those who are interested in the subject over here.

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