Xbox 360 to Most Likely Never Support DivX

By Alexander Grundner | December 12th, 2005 Comments (0)

In a recent blogcast by Major Nelson (in real life known as Microsoft’s Xbox Live Director of Programming, Larry Hryb), he publicily states DivX will “probably not” ever be supported on the Xbox 360 via Windows Media Center. Why? At 00:13:15 of the recording he gives the following reason:

The reality is… uhh, I don’t know of any commercial disks… DVDs that are sold that are using the DivX codec. I mean… common on guys! [...] Commercial folks are not using DivX in a commercial fashion. People are using it to backup their DVDs, and I’m using backup in quotes… or some of the other folks are probably using it to share files and break a lot of copyright laws.

But that’s not quite right, is it everyone? DivX itself does not break copyrights, but the users who strip DeCSS encryption from commercial DVDs do. If anything, this is just a poor excuse for Microsoft to suppress a competing technology to WMV.

Gear Live’s take:

The fact is, by choosing not to support DivX in the Media Center Extender, Microsoft is taking a two-faced approach. It is okay for music [referring to the MP3 format], but not okay for video? Guess what, Roxio’s latest release of their Easy Media Creator software touts DivX as one of their big upgrades. Roxio’s software is probably the most popular for the average consumer – it is in Target, Costco, and the almighty Wal-Mart. Of course, Roxio isn’t the only company bringing DivX to the consumer. Over the next couple of years, you are going to see people using DivX – not Windows Media Video – to save space on their hard drives from all the projects they are doing. I have seen plenty of independent bands release music videos on the DivX format. Hell, a video we had produced for us after our Mind Camp event was made available to everyone in the DivX format. Now here is the kicker – that DivX file plays perfectly, without a hitch, on our Windows Media Center 2005 PC – in the Media Center application!

Ouch… good points, Andru! If it’s any consolation, Larry Hryb did say (almost in passing) that Microsoft would consider supporting DivX, but only when all the major studios started releasing DivX encoded DVD movies to the general public. I got the feeling he was being sarcastic when he made that final statement on the subject, though.

UPDATE: HD Beat adds: “If you want to be in my living room all of the time, you need to open up to all of the possibilities. The fact is: folks are downloading high-def videos in formats you don’t readily support. They’re going to keep on doing this, so why fight it with closure of codecs? Embrace the openness and reconsider DivX support. Sure, your WMV-HD is a solid vehicle; that’s not the point. The point is: the more you shut down my entertainment options, the more I’m going to shut down products that you write software for. It’s that simple.”

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