DivX "for Mac" and Safari -- anyone get it to work on Snow Leopard?

Discussions Member Stuicy gave me the best tip of all:

"1. Get the DivXPlusWebPlayer-2.dmg, you don't need the whole divx bundle, all the bundle gives you is extra rubbish you don't need, and clutters up your HD.

"2. But to be blunt, the native Youtube HD vids (720/1080p) are just as good as divx, though of course you can't download them easily as you can with divx player."

I saved the best for last: I also asked these same questions on the Perian Community forum at Cocoaforge, and got this rather tart response from one of the Admins:

"First it should be noted that AAC is already present in QuickTime as well as Pro Res Codec (which may be what you meant there) [he's referring to the "Pro Codec" that DivX lists as one of the components of DivX 7 for Mac -- BB]."

"We have tracked down so many bugs related to the DivX components causing problems with Perian that we have decided we will never support anything that remotely involves their software. I remember the first one that I found causing a memory corruption for files containing AC3 audio and DivX video causing incorrect playback of audio; which wasted several hours of my time trying to fix a bug only to realize the bug wasn't mine to begin with. The list does not end there by a long shot. Sorry to say, but if you want any support related to their software, you've come to the wrong place."

I'm one of those obstinate people who just can't stand not being able to fix a mechanical or software problem, but a week's time is a week more than I should have wasted on DivX, OR the Big K, to begin with.

<Edited by Host>

CheeMiss wrote:

I share your frustration & head ache like you have no idea. I just hate when someone PRETENDS to know something & only provides links that really don't answer any of the problems.

Also, I think he had a post of mine deleted where I asked how to have him banned from posting to me. hahahah

It is unfortunate that the company named for the Species Malus domestica, of the Genus Malus, of the family Rosaceae, an Angiosperm of the Plantae Kingdom -- which claims to have absolutely no presence here, apparently has a post bot, which, from everything I've seen over the years in Support Discussions, is seemingly configured to allow a great deal of latitude in what amounts to spamming and aggressive behavior on the part of those members with high levels/high numbers of posts, just as if quantity equals quality.

There are a huge number of high levels/high post numbers members who really know their stuff and are more than willing to help. There are also a huge number of low levels/low post numbers members who really know their stuff and are more than willing to help. Unfortunately, there are a very great number of high levels/high post numbers members who got their high levels/high post numbers simply by dropping in to any stray post they think they can add to their scalp belt, whether they know anything about the subject at hand or not. And it's usually "or not," as in the case of Zeus here.

CheeMiss wrote:

Anyway, I did find another secret/hidden spot to remove Divx from Finder.

Hardrive/library/receipts/Divx

All I could find in that folder was "DivX Installer Log File," a log showing a quadrazillion DivX files had been installed on Macintosh HD on Thursday, December 30, 2004, 5 years before I bought my 27" iMac, and therefore the result of a System Migration. It DID, however, point to the root directory QuickTime folder, which currently shows:

DivX Decoder.component installed 07/08/11

DivX Encoder.component installed 07/08/11

Perian.component installed 07/23/11

What all that means in the context of getting the much-maligned "DivX for Mac" actually working correctly, I have no idea, but I always cringe when I see "(Anything) for Mac," because it often means it was some cobbed-up POS designed for Windows, that they let some junioe codemonkey further cobble up so it would "work" on the only Mac they had in the office, usually something pre-System 7.

Please keep us all posted on your findings. Though there are apparently some who know everything there is to know (which translates to "what little they know") about DivX for Mac, Perian, and A/V codecs in general.

I find it difficult to accept -- especially sitting in front of a 27" display fully capable of displaying a resolution of 2560 x 1440 (as it's doing right now), with a Mini DisplayPort Input which has been choked down to display no more than 720P -- adequate for Cola-buzzed Duke Nuke "Em fans, but certainly NOT good enough for a cinematic display -- unless you're willing to cough up another hefty chunk of change for an HDMI/Mini-DisplayPort scaler and switcher, but so far as I've seen, even with these, you're still stuck with Plain Old Stereo Audio:

The scaler and HDMI input port could have easily been built into the Late 2009 and later iMacs (and Cinema Displays) -- after all, if some company no one's ever heard of can do it, the Malus Domestica Pomaceous fruit organization certainly could have done the same -- but it's the same old story: The Malus Domestica Pomaceous fruit organization ALWAYS holds something back, so every 6 montjs they can announce a "New! Improved! Kills Dandruff Dead!" model that the Pomacisti HAVE to run out and buy. It's not just planned obsolesencse, it's pre-planned marketing obsolesencse.

Just don't forget the immortal words of D. Fagen and W. Becker:

"Down at the Lido, they welcome you

with sausage and beer

Klaus and the Rooster have been there too

but lately he spends his time here."

I don't know what it means, but it's GOT to mean SOMETHING, right?

Peace

Bart

Message was edited by: Bartbrn because I wanted to

Here's what I found, for what it's worth. Using Spotlight, with the search term "DivX," I got the following results:

Going to the DivX.prefpane (there are 2 becayse Spotlight's picking up the one on the Time Machine backup, too), gets you this:

This what my Library > Receipts folder looks like:

And this what the QT folder in Library looks like:

Right? Wrong? I don't know, and neither does the Rooster. I guess I must be missing something, because the DivX choice no longer appears at YouTube.

CheeMiss wrote:

Wow Bartbrn,

Your spotlight is completely different from mine. Mine is totally useless. It does NOT show all that detail of every hidden folder.

Look below and see what I mean. btw: I have the Mac OS X, version 10.5.8 & Safari 5.0.6

I uninstalled the Snow Leopard bcos of the Address book, and real time posting in other windows as well as not being able to open a link into a window instead of Tabs. I hate Tabs. I like windows bcos I can keep many of them open at the same time on the desk top. I will wait to see if they fix all these things before moving on to Tiger. (Is that the next one up after Snow Leopard), if not, then the next one up.

What model do you have???

Here is my limited spotlight search for DivX. See not even a mention about it being stored in System Preferences. btw: did you know that capitals are not needed in any search, even on google, bcos the computer only recognizes small text?

CheeMiss:

I don't think you have as many problems as you think you have.

To answer your question, I have a late 2009 27" iMac, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (i3), with the max 16 GB RAM, and I'm running OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). OS X 10.5.x was Tiger, OS X 10.7.x is the latest, Lion, which is proving somewhat problematic for some people, and I'm in no hurry to change. Tiger will soon be unsupported, but that doesn't mean you can't use it. However, I've found Snow Leopard to be the most stable Mac OS I've ever used (and I've been using them since 1989). And yes, the icon for System Prefs is different, but the function is the same. I don't use Safari -- too buggy and crash-prone, especially if you load on the Extensions. I use Google Chrome (v16.0.912.63), and it's faster, cleaner, and, for me, anyway, less buggy than either Safari or Firefox. You say:

I uninstalled the Snow Leopard bcos of the Address book, and real time posting in other windows as well as not being able to open a link into a window instead of Tabs

I'm not quite sure what you mean regarding the Address Book and "real time posting;" but as for "not being able to open a link into a window instead of Tabs," if you're talking about Safari in Tiger (and in 10.4.x, and as far back as I can remember), you can always open a link into a new window OR new tab by holding down the "Control" key, and clicking on the link. It will give you many choices of how to open, view, or save the link.

My Spotlight is completely different from yours because I don't think you're really using Spotlight. The window above is a straight Finder "Find..." Spotlight is the magnifying glass in the extreme right of your Finder menu bar. It finds things a Finder "Find..." simply will not.

Your QT Folder has the same two apparently useless DivX components (encoder and decoder) as I have, you just have the window options configured to open in Columns. The four choices are (from left to right at the far left of the Search window shown above) the little window with 4 squares is Icon View (and you can change the size of the icon, especially handy when searching for images), List View, Column View, and Cover Flow view (the value of which I've never been able to figure out, other than as eye-candy to wow the poor PC users who have to look at Windows.

To me, the problem with video, and to a lesser extent, audio, codecs is that there have been so many of them made, most by code-wonks, and often only "commandable" in the Terminal, which I find unbelievably tiresome AND a little scary, because if you don't know what you're doing in the Terminal (and I don't), you can really hose your system; but the worst part is that there are so many, and each one has their acolytes: ffmpeg, ffmpegX, Animation, H.264, JPEG-2000, MPEG-4, Pixlet, Sorensen 3, flvspider, FLAC, lame, ad infinitum, it seems. Given the fact that these projects have been started at different times -- some very long ago -- and then their home pages are left to drift like space junk on the web, so that when you search for "codecs," you have no idea -- unless you carefully look at page dates -- if your looking at something bleeding edge, or older than grandpa's spats.

If you want to get involved in a one-stop, all-video-formats site with such delectable how-to's as these:

Step-by-step guides about converting to DVD/SVCD/VCD

Step-by-step guides about converting to XviD/DivX/H.264

Check out:

http://www.ffmpegx.com/

Here's the blurb:

About ffmpegX:

ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the "hyper fast video and audio encoder" (http://ffmpeg.sf.net/), mpeg2enc the open-source mpeg-2 encoder and multiplexer (http://mjpeg.sf.net/MacOS/) and mencoder the mpeg-4 encoder with subtitles support (http://sf.net/projects/mplayerosx).

Please note: the ffmpegX project is not associated with the ffmpeg project, and support emails about ffmpegX should not be sent to the ffmpeg project !

As simple as 1.2.3 : Drop a file, choose a destination format, and click "Encode".

Reads the following input formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DIVX, XviD, non-encrypted VOB and VIDEO_TS, Quicktime .MOV, .DV, .WAV, Real Audio, Real Video, H.263, MP4 H.264, PGM, YUV, PPM, AC3, PCM8/16 bits, mulaw/Alaw, WMA-1/2, SUN AU format, MP2, MP3, AAC, 3GP, FPS1, ALAC, and even more formats

Converts the above formats to DivX, AVI XviD, H.264 MP4, MOV, DV, 3GP, Sony PSP, MP2, MP3, AAC, AC3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VCD, CVD, SVCD, KVCD, KSVCD, DVD, KDVD and MPEG-TS with complete control over encoding options.

Super-fast. Many conversions are faster than realtime. DIVX encoding on a G5 dual is twice as faster as realtime.

Queue encodings in the ffmpegX Progress window.

Includes a full-featured universal video player (mplayer) supporting VOB and text subtitles, with choice of fonts, font sizes and international text encodings including Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Greek and more.

Supports subtitles in VobSub, SubRip, MicroDVD, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub and MPsubt formats

Allows creation of DVD selectable subtitles

Includes a subtitle converter with OCR from VOB image format to SRT text format.

Includes a bitrate calculator to control best image quality and target filesize.

Includes an automatic crop tool.

Includes a series of video tools like split, join, fix, mux, demux.

Compresses a non-encrypted DVD to 4GB without reencoding it.

Reauthors SVCD as DVD.

Creates DVD image files from VIDEO_TS folders.

Converts SRT subtitles to DVD Studio Pro 1.5 format.

Creates AVI or MPG files with two audio tracks.

Authors as VCD or K/XVCD (.bin/.cue files for burning with Toast by dropping the .bin into VCD window).

Authors as SVCD, CVD or K/XSVCD (two .img files to be burned in Toast under Multitrack XA window).

Authors as DVD (/DVD/ folder for burning in Toast DVD mode, and .img file for burning in Disk Image app or Toast disk image mode).

WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T CONFUSE FFMPEGX WITH FFMPEG! (how could anyone POSSIBLY confuse them?). Apparently, ffmpegX and ffmpeg are two warring planets from a parallel dimension, and if you ask a question, say, in ffmpeg.org about ffmpegX, the ffmpeggians will hunt you down, stake you to a Marabunta (not to be confused with Ubuntu) ant hill, and pour honey all over you. You'll be a skeleton bleaching in the sun in about 15 minutes.

ffmpegX SEEMS like a reasonably intelligent and relatively painless project -- no ants -- and they have lots of "How-to's," and deal with just about every codec under the sun. It gave me a headache worse than TWO Klauses, but that was awhile ago. If you find anything useful -- and there is much DivX info there (I think) -- please come back and share what you've found.

Peace

Bart

The person who started this post is yours truly (Jun 8, 2011 4:42 PM), and this DivX info is equally applicable to Tiger, but if you want to move to the Topic:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3579489?answerId=17037320022#17037320022

No prob.

Klaus, Zeus-like though he may fancy himself, does not have the authority to remove posts, or even warts, corns, or unwanted hair. He's an ill-wind who blows no one any good, though he does seem to have quite a prodigious amount of hot air at his disposal.