[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] DivX6 support

[Corey Hickey]

Diego Biurrun wrote:
>>> Which is one of the things that makes me ask: why would we want this
>>> feature at all? It's not like we don't have enough other features to
>>> take care of / review / commit.
>> IMO we wouldn't, but perhaps other people have opinions. Personally
>> I'm against including any new additional support for linking non-free
>> libraries to MPlayer aside from the binary loader, and would like to
>> phase out whatever we already have.
> 
> I see your point.  Maybe now is the right moment to discuss and decide
> this issue once and for all.
> 
> First off: What would we remove if we decided to kick out all the
> proprietary crap apart from the binary loader?  AFAICT it would be
> 
> divx4_vbr.c
> divx4_vbr.h
> libmpcodecs/vd_odivx.c
> libmpcodecs/vd_divx4.c
> libmpcodecs/ve_divx4.c
> 
> Did I overlook something?  IMO this is just legacy stuff and proprietary
> to boot.  I see little reason to keep it.
> 
> DivX 6 support would be interesting to make codec comparisons, but is it
> faster than libavcodec?  I doubt it...

For decoding, I doubt it too, offhand. For encoding, I suspect the
comparison would be sort of like comparing lavc to XviD -- there are
different areas on the quality vs. speed curve where each codec shows
it's strength. That's all speculation, though: I haven't tested DivX in
ages since MPlayer hasn't supported it and/or there hasn't been a Linux
DivX binary.

Testing and comparison are the only reasons I see for including DivX
support. Are those reasons worth it? I say so. I dislike proprietary
codec implementations too, but it's useful to know where the competition
stands.

-Corey