02-05-2009, 03:11 AM
beerman wrote:
I will interject an opinion on one point of Article Accelerator and Filliam's love fest. The ATV only supports playback of h264 and mpeg4 video files in it's stock format. Since 99% of downloadable video on the internet is in the divx format, and osx plays back divx files perfectly, we have to assume apple is distancing itself from illegal downloads by purposely not supporting divx. I think this is a mistake and has hurt their widespread adoption. If they supported divx I say they would 10x their sales.
I think Apple will not do this for several reasons:
- at best, DivX is a de facto standard, not a real standard; Apple isn't into de facto standards
- Apple considers H.264 to be a superior codec
- no commercial download services encode in DivX
- DivX is most popular among geeks and hobbyists; Apple is interested in a much larger market