Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

Integrated delivery - DivX and Stage6

Online Video hosting and Video on Demand websites have become the mediascape hallmark of the decade. Lauded on a range of levels from a 'democratization' of content delivery away from centralized broadcasters, to a paradigm shift in aesthetic expectations, and even as the medium to kill and replace TV.

Of course the centre piece (by popularity if nothing else) is YouTube attracting some 60% of online video viewers. But whilst the menagerie of YouTube alternatives for the moment duke it out over the remaining 40% there is a compelling argument to suggest that YouTube's days are numbered. Maintaining their massive market dominance is hard enough but what is also taking place is the inevitable aesthetic shift in viewer expectations.

YouTube cultivated a very particular visual aesthetic built off the lo-fi punk culture of mobile phone cameras and a DIY ethos. YouTube's great success was the invocation of pixelation and poor quality as assets rather than drawbacks. The YouTube 'look' quickly became the embodiment of 'truth' and 'actuality'. Even advertising started using the YouTube paradigm as an aesthetic choice for traditional TV broadcast.



But times change and with them the culture of user expectation; expectations that are driven by technology. So when quite sophisticated non linear editing systems are built into the OS of every home computer, mobile phones have 5megapixel photo sensors, there's an ever upward speed trend of broadband and ever higher quality focused nature of compression algorithms; the YouTube aesthetic may be under threat from a viewing culture that now has a much higher visual benchmark.

The Flash Video format (FLV), with its move from the old SorensonSpark to the On2 codec, has serviced the online video culture by a capacity to deliver short form streaming media at a watchable quality over very low - sub 400kbps - datarates.

But other codecs may be more forward looking to a time of high quality expectations and big bandwidths. AVC (aka H.264 and Mpeg4 part 10) is much lauded for its ability to not only deliver DVD quality at half the bitrate of Mpeg2 but also to deliver HD at viable file sizes. AVC has also seen much support from hardware manufacturers with numerous media players from mobile to Blu-ray and PS3 all utilizing AVC (generally in the form of the *.MP4 wrapper)

But AVC has a major drawback that has become a bane to many end users. AVC is incredibly inefficient for playback requiring massive amounts of decompression and so a huge and overt drain on the computer CPU. Whilst the quality to size ratio is excellent with AVC all the image clarity in the world won't make for a quality viewing experience if the playback stutters and skips.

One of the new era alternatives aimed at a premium viewer experience of image quality whilst maintaining modest bitrates is DivX. Long the stalwart of particular niche users (such as Gamers, Machinima makes and Peer2Peer dvd pirateers) DivX has been pushing hard as a mainstream alternative for high-quality streaming media.



Moreover DiVX has made significant plays at becoming a format of choice for standalone hardware. There is a remarkably wide variety of DVD players on the market that enable DivX playback directly from optical disc. Similarly there is an even wider set of portable media players and digital cameras that can playback and record video in the DivX codec (a a variant on Mpeg4) using the ubiquitous AVI wrapper.

It's a hard war to fight; the relatively small DivX group have no where near the marketing and profile clout of international consortia behind AVC/h.264, WMV/VC1 and FLV/On2. But DivX is certainly holding its own as a popular encoding and delivery choice and doing so by being clever, not just in regard to the Codec, but by a very holistic approach to digital content.

On a quality level the DivX codec certainly holds its own against AVC and WMV but on its own, being as good as without being significantly better isn't  good enough when you are the small fish. What DivX offers however to compete is superb efficiency and slick ease of playback that makes AVC pale by comparison. DivX is an extremely lightweight compression scheme to unpack and playback on computer, mobile device and standalone disc player. A full 1080p HD DivX file will have little trouble playing back on older or more modest computer where an AVC/MP4 file of the same ilk is more than likely to splutter. Moreover streaming DivX played through the DivX webplayer requires proportional less data speed of connection.

The other tact that DivX embraces as a way to forge popularity in a crowded market place of delivery options is a very holistic approach and a deeply integrated platform that stretches well beyond the DivX codec. DivX is really a suite of tools and systems geared towards both the creation and delivery of digital content across the diversity of platforms.

The DivX codec provides an encoding architecture that can be accessed from just about any video editing system to render directly to DivX from the timeline. DivX files are supported by the DivX player; a very effective and sleek media player and media manager. There is also the DivX webplayer which functions as a browser plug in to play streaming DivX videos. The DivX converter provides a neat application for converting most common file formats to DivX and the the Divx Authoring system allows for DVD-style menu-based discs to produced. Such discs play as DVD's in DivX certified devices but can deliver Mpeg2 quality at much lower bitrates and file sizes.



The last piece of this DivX platform to fall into place is Stage6, the online video hosting and streaming site built around the Divx format. Stage6 obviously follows a line forged by the myriad of similar video hosting services such as YouTube distributing user-generated content. However Stage6 aims squarely at the next phase of user-generated video, one where quality of both production and experience is the focus.



Exclusively using the DivX codec and DivX webplayer, Stage6 doesn't tightly reduce and restrict the resolution of the viewable image and instead embraces much higher spatial resolutions than the standard YouTube 320x240 including 640x480, SD, HD 720 and even 1080.

Obviously by nature of this ability to host larger resolutions Stage6 is very much focused on a user base viewing over fat broadband connections. But rather than a negative DivX plays this element as a point-of-difference for Stage6. Where most other online hosting services are focused on users en-masse with mass access, DivX puts the focus on quality not quantity.

Re-enforcing this idea is the Stage6 system of 'Karma' that governs usage of the site. Positive use of Stage6 - uploading videos that rate well, attracting comments to your videos and leaving comments and ratings on others - builds Karma. Having sufficient Karma allows the user to setup a dedicated channel for their videos and other such advanced features.

The use of the Karma system in Stage6 is designed as a filtration system to bring the cream to the top via what amounts an effective Peer-Review process. Producers looking to use Stage6 as a platform to deliver an ongoing video series or to present a body of work may be disappointed that such a 'channel' service is unavailable until significant karma is accrued. But there is some wisdom in the approach of making a dedicated Channel space more intrinsically valuable and exclusive thus presenting the perception of quality - both in content and aesthetics.

In a number of ways the DivX system - crowned off by the Stage6 VOD platform focused on high quality and high resolution delivery – presents a very holistic and well considered approach to digital media. Rather than a narrow focus on one area of digital content or a patchy approach to leveraging encoding and delivery together, DivX/Stage6 arguably presents the best integrated digital delivery platform available at the current date. No one else can boast of a unified system that encodes, authors, manages and plays digital media across so many platforms and from so many directions. But of course the new Adobe Media Player is in the wings and the once thats strapped to the formidable arsenal of the Adobe creative suite of production tools it may be an unstoppable force.

Posted at 12:00AM Dec 13, 2007 by Mike Jones in video  |  Comments[6]