LG Mobile has announced that its very popular Viewty mobile phone has now become the first handset to become certified for recording video using DivX compression.
Although the list of DivX-certified devices continues to grow, the list of mobile phones is very short. There are only two phones that even support DivX playback, the Samsung SGH-F500 and SGH-F508.
The Viewty camera phone captures video at an abnormally large 120 FPS and a relatively large 640 x 480 Resolution. Besides adding better quality Compression the Viewty will no longer need to use conversion software that 3GP video needs.
Result for: DivX
DivX has announced today that they have completed a licensing deal with Mtekvision, a global leader in advanced mobile semiconductor technology that will give rare DivX Mobile Certification to a new processor Chipset that will be used in upcoming mobile phones.
The MtekVision MV8722, which is a member of the Maple family of media processors will allow mobile phone owners with the chip to playback DivX video at resolutions of up to 720×400.
So far there over 100 million devices that are DivX Certified but mobile phones are only just beginning to receive the certification.
“Mtekvision is dedicated toward creating mobile solutions that foster a rich multimedia experience and allow users to benefit from superior portable technology,” said Simon Morris, CEO, MtekVision Canada Ltd. “Offering DivX Mobile Certification enables us to provide our partners and customers with a valuable feature for ensuring the highest quality video possible across mobile devices.”
“MtekVision’s MV8722 illustrates DivX’s commitment toward expanding an ecosystem of devices that operate with a common media language,” said Patrice Lagrange, Vice President and Group Business Manager, Media Languages, DivX, Inc. “With consumers continuously on the move, it is important to offer mobile solutions that maintain the entertainment standards set by the living room and provide a seamless experience between the myriad of devices used daily.”
Result for: DivX
The Xiph.Org Foundation has just announced the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is an open source video codec designed to be a royalty free alternative to high compression formats like MPEG-4.
Theora is based on the proprietary VP3 codec developed by On2 Technologies, but is licensed under a BSD-style license. This means it doesn’t have any of the common open source restrictions on commercial software like forcing derivative works to also be released under as open source.
Even though the format itself has been unchanged since 2004, as the first official stable release Theora 1.0 is still a major milestone. In order to attract the interest of commercial software and especially hardware developers stability, or at least the perception of stability, is an important consideration.
Another aspect of Theora its developers hope will be significant is its relatively low CPU footprint. That makes it particularly suitable for mobile devices like smartphones and portable media players.
Still, it remains to be seen if it can truly become an industry standard (in any industry). It may be that the widespread support for standards like MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, XviD, Nero Digital, etc,… ), MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), and VC-1 already in place will prove more of a factor than any perceived benefits to Theora.
