Petteri Pyyny
1 Oct 2002 8:19
DivXNetworks' PR department must be busy writing their press releases so that general public get excited, even aroused of the distant possibility to have DivX playback on their consoles/DVD players/fridges/etc. But as usual, this is one of those "aww, nothing for us" news once again. Anyway, DivXNetworks has joined with Factor 5 and released a DivX for Nintendo GameCube Software Developer's Kit which allows game developers to use DivX playback in their games, etc.
The SDK aims to overcome the fact that GameCube's game discs can hold only 1.3GB of data, limiting the amount of video available for games, etc to very minimum -- when compared to PS2 and XBox which both can use DVD discs, upto 8.5GB per side when using dual layer discs. Traditionally games use MPEG-2 encoded video, just like DVD-Video does, but by allowing developers to use MPEG-4 instead, the video bitrate can be significantly lower and still maintain decent video quality.
Source: DivXNetworks' press release