DivX removal - is it technically necessary?

[alexpigment]

I've been following the removal of DivX for the upcoming release, and while it hasn't affected me in any meaningful way yet (perhaps I'm grandfathered in anyway), I did start to wonder if this is even a necessary step. DivX is a proprietary implementation of the MPEG-4 Part 2 spec, and I certainly understand that you would need to license it as an encoder. However, wouldn't an XviD decoder (or another generic MPEG-4 decoder) be able to decode DivX files? If so, is there any licensing necessary in that scenario?

I figure the MRMC crew generally knows what they're doing, but as a person who used to deal with these sorts of codec licensing issues (and removal of codec support in several cases), I thought it might be worth bringing this up just in case. I also respect that sometimes it's best to play it safe in the event that a company tries to claim infringement on a closed source project.

Lastly, if this question is getting too much into the behind-the-scenes stuff, feel free to delete it. I totally will not be offended if you'd simply rather not have a public discussion about licensing.

[davilla]

Decoding DiVX requires a paid license. The license holder will go after apps that can decode DiVX and are not paying the license. They tend to hit the app "stores", looking for violators. We speak from direct experience. Observation shows they only go after paid apps. Others that are "free", like Kodi, they ignore for some reason.

DiVX is really an inferior and dead video format and it is trivial to convert, so we decided, enough is enough and we no longer support the DiVX ecosystem. Not sure why people are using DiVX in the first place.

[alexpigment]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I remember Dolby being the same way for programs that decoded AC-3 without a license. I guess I was under the wrong impression that a non-DivX decoder is irrelevant - it just comes down to apps that decode DivX-encoded files.

Also, while I do agree that DivX is irrelevant going forward, there is a long history of DivX-encoded files, and I'm sure I've got quite a bit from the mid 2000s. I'm a firm believer that re-encoding should be avoided whenever possible for preservation's sake. Unless you are OK with making a file considerably larger than the original lossy format, you will almost always lose detail.

At any rate, this isn't a major problem for me. The TV being used with MRMC is mostly used for playing MPEG-2 and H.264 files. The fact that MRMC plays interlaced content so well on an Apple TV was the main reason I was excited to use it - the majority of my files are either 480i or 1080i - and this is simply a non-starter with most cheap android boxes. Thanks for the great work guys!