JamieG Analysis

DivX has just purchased MainConcept.  (See announcement) Let me type that again.

DivX, the Codec company of choice for Pirated media, has just purchased the leading Codec company for H.264, the slated Codec of choice for media for the coming future.

Now that does this all mean?  Well straight of the bat, this is likely to mean that H.264 will likely become the codec of choice for Pirate Content over the next year.

DivX is likely to put H.264 encoding options in all there tools which many Pirates use for encoding illegal videos that are then placed on Torrent sites.

H.264 is likely to be adopted as it gives you better quality per byte.  For example, many Pirate videos are restricted to the size of a CD so you can burn it and play it on a DivX DVD player.  However, in many cases, this is too much compression.  If H.264 was used.  This would improve the quality substantially without using any more bandwidth/file size.

Personally I am surprised H.264 has not been adopted earlier.  I put this down to the fact that H.264 takes a lot longer to encoder, and you need more powerful decoding systems.  This problem is diminishing as new PCs are super computers these days.

One should not overlook another interesting development.  If H.264 becomes the codec of choice for everything, (Including pirated content).  And we will soon have Flash, a H.264 player, in every browser….

We then add the fact that many western countries are getting faster and faster Internet connections.  The new capabilities we are likely to start seeing is that of people streaming content between each other in DVD quality from media servers.

This adds a new twist to pirating being those who know how to download a Torrent client and surf Torrent sites…

You purchase a Set Top Box or use your computer, running Flash, and simply point it at your friends Media server and watch whatever shows he has collected.

Use of DRM content will, of course, stop all this.  So why will anyone use it when there will always be non-DRM versions created by a fan some place.  And once there is one non DRM version, the great copy machine that is the internet, will make sure that one copy is now every ones copy…

The new slogan of the media professional. “Change or Die”.