Sorry, but this post has been vandalized by spammers that somehow altered the post text. If anyone has a saved backup of this post, please give it to me.

Today, DivX Inc. released the new version of its famous video codec. Usually, this is utterly uninteresting news, but not this time: Version 7 is actually not an MPEG-4 ASP codec like its predecessors, but a H.264 one, based on the implementation of MainConcept. This makes the codec a lot more interesting, especially since the decoder part is free (as in beer).

The H.264 software decoder situation on Windows was a bit complicated: There just was no perfect decoder. The InterVideo and CyberLink come only with their respective Blu-ray player applications, the one in QuickTime is complete crap, the Nero one doesn’t want to work in applications other than Nero’s own. So we only had ffdshow, which is open source, cool, but a little bit slow, and CoreAVC, which is blazing fast, but you need to pay for it.
As of today, this problem has been resolved once and for all: DivX 7 is the ultimate H.264 software decoder on Windows, period. I ran a little benchmark today and the results are very impressive: DivX 7 is always faster than CoreAVC, usually about 10% for CABAC sequences. ffdshow, on the other hand, is always slowest and makes the least use of multi-core CPUs.

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Like last year, I’d like to give some recommendations what demos of 2008 are worth watching. As usual, this reflects only my personal opinion. That means if you totally love MFX demos, you won’t like my selection ;)
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