In an attempt to popularize Blu-ray disc (BD) players among consumers, several makers of these devices have decided to enabled playback of content encoded using DivX codec on their BD equipment.DivX, the company behind DivX, has announced that it has granted DivX Certification to six new Blu-ray players from Panasonic, Philips, and Denon.
"The end of the format war creates more opportunity for Blu-ray products. In-Stat expects worldwide shipments of Blu-ray players to reach 23 million in 2011. DivX is well-positioned to become a standard feature on Blu-ray devices, just as it has shipped in millions of DVD players worldwide," said In-Stat principal analyst Michelle Abraham.
From technical point of view it is very easy to enable DivX playback on Blu-ray or HD DVD players: all the processing power required to decode DivX content is already installed and it is only a matter of software and/or firmware update to enable DivX support. Newly certified BD players include devices from Panasonic (Model: DMP-BD30EE), Philips (Model: BDP7200) and Denon (Models: DVD-2500BTC1B, DVD-3800BDC1B, DVD-3800BDSP and DVD-2500BTSP).
The growth of DivX technology in the emerging Blu-ray market demonstrates growing traction of the company’s licensing business into new product categories. DivX technology has already become a de facto standard on standard definition DVD devices, with an estimated 41% penetration in the global market as of the end of 2007.
The DivX and its brother XviD formats are used to distribute copyright protection-free movies typically by the Internet and usually without content producer approval. Both codecs are based on MPEG 4 ASP and offer balance between video quality and file size.
Adding the DivX support to BD players will allow their owners to playback movies ripped from DVDs and available through the Internet, substantially improving usage model of their devices that can already playback Blu-ray discs and DVDs.
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