Philips, Seagate to Ship DivX Plus HD Certified Products
Philips and Seagate will be among the first companies with DivX Plus HD-certified products, starting with deliveries in Q2, DivX Product Manager Ryan Taylor told us. Philips is expected to field a DivX Plus HD-equipped Blu-ray player for the European market, while Seagate adds a portable hard drive, Taylor said.
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DivX Plus HD, which can deliver 1080p H.264 video in the MKV file format, is compatible with new DivX Plus software that is to be available starting today as a free download for Microsoft Windows 7, Vista and XP-based PCs. The Philips and Seagate products are among the first to gain DivX Plus HD certification since the program was established shortly after the release of DivX 7 software last year (CED March 26 p5). Ten chipset suppliers also are DivX Plus HD certified, including Panasonic for its UniPhier ICs that are at the heart of Blu-ray players. DivX 7, which added support for H.264 technology acquired when DivX bought MainConcept in 2007, will be replaced by DivX Plus.
"We made a tremendous amount of progress on the IC side and there was a lot of momentum there,” a DiVx spokeswoman said. “That’s the first step and once you are in chips you can get into devices."
The new DivX software seeks to broaden the company’s user base. It adds DivX to Go, which features a simple interface that allows users to transfer video from the DivX Plus to the more than 250 million DivX-certified devices including DVD players, DTVs and PlayStation 3. In seeking to attract users new to the DivX format, DivX shifted functions like audio enhancement and recording to the “tools” section from the main interface, Taylor said. The most frequently used options like playing video and a download manager for video-on-demand are featured on the main interface, he said. “We tried to consolidate the menu so that things that were among the Top 5 most used” features were included in the main interface, Taylor said.
For more advanced DivX customers, the DivX Plus converter was redesigned to allow free conversion of 1080p video to DivX Plus HD. While the converter still handles simple tasks like dragging a file, it also enables users to customize the video resolution, set audio bit rates and compress a file to fit on a USB drive, CD or DVD, Taylor said. Also included is a new DivX Plus Codec Pack that allows Windows 7 to play MKV files. It also allows hardware acceleration of H.264 video for XP and Vista PCs, he said.
The DivX Plus Web Player, based on technology originally developed for the company’s defunct Stage 6 video service, was revamped for the new software. It enables Plus HD video streaming with 5.1 surround sound and subtitles through standard HTTP servers and JavaScript programming. The web player can be a plug in for Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.
Whether DivX Plus software plays a role in the company’s forthcoming DivX TV streaming service hasn’t been decided, Taylor said. DivX TV is expected to launch later this year with more than 70 “channels” as the company tries to build on its Connected products platform. LG Electronics signed a licensing agreement to include DivX TV as part of its NetCast Internet service, which also includes Vudu and Netflix. DivX struggled to gain acceptance for first-generation Connected products including Hauppauge Digital and D-Link devices, the latter having been discontinued (CED Jan 11 p7).
Meanwhile, sales to Samsung and Sony accounted for 13 percent and 12 percent, respectively, of DivX’s $70.6 million in revenue for the year ended Dec. 31, the company said in a 10K filed Monday. A year earlier, LG accounted for 11 percent of DivX’s revenue of $93.9, the company said. Consumer hardware licensing revenue dropped to $49.6 million from $61.7 million, while those from software rose to $15.2 million from $13.3 million. The jump in software was from a $4 million increase in DivX’s MainConcept video software licensing business, the company said. Advertising and third-party distribution sales sank to $5.3 million from $18.2 million, DivX said. The distribution business suffered from the loss of Yahoo, which paid fees to DivX based on installations of its software. DivX switched last year to Google, which paid the company fees based on successful activations of Google products, including its Chrome browser, with DivX software.