Lacking, does not do what it says - Rufus J

This review may be very misleading. I have tried a large number of DivX and Xvid encoded files, including many DX50 files, and found very few which did not play. QT is not nearly as forgiving of malformed files (bad index, no fourcc's, wrong audio types) as mplayer and vlc, which is pretty well known. The DivX decoder allows playback, with sound, of "illegal" files using vbr mp3 as audio and this does seem to be working pretty well here, but QT still won't open files with other problems. Is it possible you have some bad files? WMA audio? And, finally, you don't have to spend $20 to use this just for playback.

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Friday, December 09 2005 @ 06:05 PM PST

Lacking, does not do what it says - it_is_today

Let me remind you their site makes these claims:

Fortunately, with DivX 6 for Mac, you can use QuickTime or any application that supports QuickTime playback to watch any DivX video on your Mac, whether that video was created by a soulless, PC-using drone or a cultured Mac aesthete like yourself.

"to watch any DivX video ... whether that video was created by a soulless...[etc]". And here you are making excuses and saying "well it's QT's fault!". Well if the codec is only designed to play in QT and comes with no separate player then as far as I can tell, they're simply mistaken. It cannot play "any DivX video".

One of the files does have WMA (wma2 specifically) audio, while another one has mpga audio, and it can't even play that correctly! It skips and only every 2 seconds or so you'll here a millisecond of audio from the clip.

VLC plays all of these files without any complaint, and does it flawlessly. If these guys are going to claim you can play "any DivX" file made essentially by anyone, including "soulless drones", then their product should do exactly that!

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Friday, December 09 2005 @ 06:22 PM PST

Lacking, does not do what it says - Rufus J

Not making excuses. I'm thinking that the screwed-up files aren't QuickTime's fault. Or DivX's, either, for that matter. Do you believe "soulless, PC-using drone" is synonymous with incompetent boob? The problem isn't with QT or with DivX, but, in most cases, with the avi container that all the Windows users export to and how carefully it needs to be handled.

As for its claim of compatibility, DivX surely means every DivX version and I'm willing to bet there aren't very many people who share your ridiculously literal view of their statement. If we are holding people to that standard, then it must be said your assessment of this codec's performance is absolutely wrong because I have seen it play many files just fine, including DivX 5, whereas you say it only shows a blank screen and/or won't play audio. (Really, that's what you said...) Sheesh...

And, finally, I have had some avis that neither vlc nor mplayer would open, as well, including files which were encoded with supported codecs. That's just life happening.

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Friday, December 09 2005 @ 08:02 PM PST

Lacking, does not do what it says - it_is_today

Look, it's really quite simple. People want to be able to view the video files they download. VLC and mplayer will play more of these files. People don't care if the person did a poor job of encoding them. I'm not even sure if this is true actually, you're claiming that someone poorly encoded the video I have without even having any information about this file. The fact is that both mplayer and VLC play the files just fine. Many AVIs have wma audio in them, and mac users should be able to listen to them. They can with VLC; they can't with this. Simple as that. You can go and hunt down the author of every video file that doesn't play with this QT component and instruct them in the art of proper encoding, but personally, I think it'd be a lot easier to just view it in VLC.

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Saturday, December 10 2005 @ 06:51 PM PST