Why Do AMV Makers Make .mp4 Video Formats For Their AMVs Now

[Buttercupmensadklfm]

A few years ago around 2005-2007 everyone used to make their amvs in the .avi video formats (especially MEP amvs), now ever since 2008 the video formats are all .mp4 video formats? Why did everyone make the switch from .avi to .mp4 video formats?

[AaronAMV]

it's the cool thing to do

and the quality is better with a smaller size file

[Kariudo]

x.264 came out, and offered better looking videos with smaller filesizes.
x.264 makes heavy use of B-frames, which the .avi container was not meant to handle. (It's possible, but highly not recommended.)
mp4 and mkv both have b-frame support, but for one reason or another .mp4 won out over here

[Bauzi]

.avi was most of the time used with XviD or DivX
.mp4 is now most used with x264 it makes around a 1/3 less filesize compared to XviD, DivX

it's way more efficient.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Progress.

[Qyot27]

It's not sudden at all. Use of H.264 has been on the rise since x264 reached well recognition, and that was in early 2005. As computers have gotten exponentially more powerful, the fact that H.264 takes more resources to play back is no longer a factor. Software decoding support has also gotten a lot better. H.264 is also one of the formats used on Blu-ray (and HD-DVD, before its demise), so it has plenty of commercial momentum.

As to why MP4 took hold more than MKV for the container, it's probably a result of the fact that MP4 support is more widespread in stand-alone players than MKV (even if the Profile restrictions aren't adhered to for PC-based distribution), and the fact that most editors don't have a need for the advanced features MKV provides (mostly ASS subtitles, ordered chapters, attachments, etc.). There are one or two players now that support MKV, but that's really only because DivX adopted it as the container for DivX 7.

Personally, I use MKV except when I have no subtitles or other things to put in/with the video. I've been using MKV since mid-2004.

[Bauzi]

Can somebody explain me why DivX is still alive?

Years ago XviD just owened DivX and I don't think that DivX made that much of a progress. H.264 is superior and XviD is a free open source product. So why is it still alive? Why is there so much more hardware out there today that supports DivX and not other common distribution formats?

It's a mistery for me, but than again... Real is also still alive.

[Qyot27]

Can somebody explain me why DivX is still alive?

Years ago XviD just owened DivX and I don't think that DivX made that much of a progress. H.264 is superior and XviD is a free open source product. So why is it still alive? Why is there so much more hardware out there today that supports DivX and not other common distribution formats?

It's a mistery for me, but than again... Real is also still alive.

Because DivX is a business, whereas XviD is not. For most of that time, DivX stayed relevant because they had/have the resources to get hardware standards implemented. There is nothing technically different between DivX and XviD as far as their streams are concerned - both are MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile encoders, and output streams compliant to that standard (and XviD can easily create files that work on DivX's hardware). It's like asking why there are still commercial MPEG-2 encoders when you've got the freeware HCenc or the open source encoder in ffmpeg. Simply put, these things do have their place.

As of DivX 7 (DivX Plus HD), they do H.264 now too, and still have the clout to get hardware manufacturers to support their profiles on standalones (which isn't a bad thing by any means). And concerning H.264, the DivX H.264 decoder apparently ranks somewhere between ffdshow and CoreAVC in terms of speed, but it's free (and didn't suffer from the weightp issue CoreAVC did a couple months ago before the release of 2.0). I'm just parroting that info second-hand, as I haven't tried it out at all, but that's what I keep hearing.

Relating to the hardware vendors, having compatibility with DivX 7 provides what the Blu-ray standards should have had but don't - like progressive 30fps.