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Company Success Stories - DivX®
AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor and DivX® Video Lift Barriers to Home Digital Video Production
Profile
DivX®
"Processor optimized for digital media combined with video encoding leader could spell demise of the holiday newsletter - Jérôme Rota"
Jérôme Rota had a problem, so he did what most people wouldn’t do. He created a technology that could fix it and built a company around it.
As a freelance graphic artist, Rota – the creator of DivX® video software and co-founder of DivXNetworks, Inc. – wanted an efficient way to showcase his portfolio of work.
After putting his portfolio in order, Rota made DivX the name to know for shrinking huge video files. The DivX “codec” (compression/decompression) squeezes video data down to a small size using technology that makes transporting files over the Internet a piece of cake, while also preserving premium visual quality.
Now, Rota wants to make it easy for anyone to create, edit and manipulate video on their home PC. Network bandwidth has increased and home connections have become speedier, making mainstream users crave more access to digital audio and video. However, creating this digital video is one of the most CPU-intensive jobs mainstream users will ever undertake, and today’s 32-bit processors are not always up to the task.
That’s why Rota and DivXNetworks turned to AMD.
AMD64 Delivers More
With AMD and the AMD64 platform, Rota and DivXNetworks developed a 64-bit version of Dr. DivX, the official DivX video encoding application. This turbo-charged version of the application will allow users to more quickly create digital movies. Power-hungry applications like these demand the processing power of the AMD Athlon 64 processor and a 64-bit platform and operating system. That’s why Rota can’t wait for the release of the Windows® XP 64-Bit Edition expected in the second half of 2004. The beta version has been available since September 2003.
“The AMD Athlon™ 64 processor, can move more data at once in the 64-bit mode,” says Rota. “It’s definitely a huge step in the right direction for applications like digital video encoding. Having a more efficient architecture in the CPU with more direct access to memory really gives an edge over the previous architecture and does the job more efficiently.”
Encoding compresses raw video into a manageable size that can be copied to DVD or CD recordable media, attached to an e-mail message, or stored on a computer’s hard drive. “Encoding video is a very long process – full-length video content contains thousands of frames, and every frame contains a huge amount of information that needs to be processed to produce the best compression and visual quality,” says Rota. “Overall encoding time can take several hours. It’s a very time consuming process.”
More than 100 million users have downloaded and used DivX video technology since its launch — and many of these users will likely be eager to transition to the 64-bit incarnation of the Dr. DivX encoding application. After all, the ability to reduce video to a fraction of its original size is priceless when you’re sending baby videos to friends and relatives — who can then watch Junior on their television set if they want. It’s all about your content on your schedule.
Ahead of the Curve with AMD and 64-bit Computing
Rota says the collaboration with AMD to create a 64-bit version of Dr. DivX really put the company ahead of the curve on the development side, and that’s only the beginning.
“AMD has been very responsive and has offered us very good support in developing the 64-bit version of Dr. DivX,” he says. “Our strategy and AMD’s work well together – it’s a unique situation. I want to get to the point where you can encode a one-hour video in five minutes — the amount of time it currently takes to burn a CD. A few years ago, burning the CD would take an hour. This amount of performance improvement is the same kind of thing we want to achieve with video compression.”
The sizzling combination of the AMD Athlon 64 processor and DivX technology is nirvana for digital video users of all kinds, since both technologies work together to drastically reduce rendering time and improve overall process and speed. Rota says 64-bit computing is all about bringing consistency to users.
“It’s very important to use the maximum potential of a CPU when you process compressed digital media,” he says. “You cannot afford to be inefficient when you have to encode a hundred thousand frames. Any inefficiencies might make it take ten times longer and, for us, it’s just not worth taking the chance. 64-bit technology is the next logical step for us.”
The next “killer app”?
As for the future, Rota says the sky’s the limit with the advent of the AMD Athlon 64 processor.
“I definitely think this is coming at the right time and will make this lifestyle a reality and something that is easy to embrace,” he says. “Consumers will be able to use technology to its fullest extent by taking it with them on the go and in the house. You wouldn’t have a library of DVDs on your wall, but libraries of digital videos stored on a hard drive in one of your closets.”
Rota believes video encoding will definitely be part of the next “killer application” and will make the digital content easier to organize and virtually transparent. And with $3,000 digital video cameras flying off the shelves and do-it-yourself editing programs available at every computer supercenter, it’s a trend consumers have already accepted.
“This has definitely become a mainstream application,” says Rota. “People shoot their own videos, they edit them at home and they want to share those experiences with relatives and others, and DivX video is the best way of doing it. Now with a broadband connection and the AMD Athlon 64 processor, a five-minute video to family just might replace the holiday newsletter.”
© 2003 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Athlon and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. DivX is a registered trademark of DivXNetworks, Inc. Other product and company names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.
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