On the DivX homepage both Blender Foundation opensource movies (Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream) are being showcased, with links to Blender sites and the movie downloads to demonstrate the free DivX 7 video player.
The DivX website homepage can be viewed here.
18 Comments
Wow, this is really cool! Congratulations to the peach team.
Cool. On the VLC site too: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/screenshots.html
way hay! :)
In Igor, Scamper looks a lot like that BBB goofy squirrel.
Blender will always be in my heart. :)
This is DivXcellent !
The power of CC and GPL in action! YAY!
\o/
Nice to see BBB being recognized.
Wow. Pretty cool.
So how exactly did they render an animation into an MKV container? Did they use a modified build or did they just compress it to MKV in post-pro? (with like VirtualDub or something)
@advs89: I'd say post conversion.
@article: awesome! :3
Hi all!
I work as part of the DivX community team. Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream have both been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and I have to congratulate the Peach and Orange open-movie teams, as well as Blender Foundation and all of it's contributors for their fantastic work!
advs89: That's a good question :) I actually encoded all of the showcase content using the DivX H.264 CLI Encoder Alpha 1, a free download from http://labs.divx.com/projectremoulade (a free DivX Labs account is required). The lossless PNG sequences were passed to the encoder using an AVISynth script via the ImageSource() function and the result was a raw H.264 video bitstream. Additionally the stereo and surround FLAC audio sources were converted into AAC streams and some of the subtitles for Elephants Dream into SRT format. Using the localized scripts for Elephants Dream I also created a list of chapter points (the chapter names will show in a future version of DivX Player), and some basic metadata and all of these source components were fed into MKVMerge to produce the final files.
The DivX 7 playback software is free and you can either use DivX Player or a third party player to watch as we've included DirectShow filters to extend support for the format to most third-party players. Our H.264 decoder has very high performance so most systems should cope well with the HD playback.
Can't wait for the next open-movie ;)
-Alastair / DigitAl56K
Also the DIRAC project use BBB and ED to demo the codec:
http://dirac.kw.bbc.co.uk/download/video/maybefinal/
Pretty awesome - the more coverage the better. :D
Blender is really starting to pop up everywhere. This is proof of the awareness and respect that Blender is gaining.
I got into blender like 2 weeks ago, when I first saw Big buck bunny. And the idé of this open source 3d program is so clever. Sins very many ppl likes making animation/games/pictures i see a great potential in this, and thats because they can easly help devloping blender with new featurs wich they program.
@Alastair: I noticed on the divx website it's not obvious whether the codec is real free software with sources available or freeware with closed sources. I think it would be helpful to mention it, ie when you say free, you could add sthg like (for non commercial use / closed source).
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