DivX Breaks Ground in Supporting Flash Video

Earlier this week, Ubergizmo broke the news that DivX (DIVX) has officially updated their Connected software to include support for flash video. With 98% of the world’s computers already using flash, this may not seem like a big deal, but when you consider that 0% of the world’s televisions supports flash, this really is groundbreaking.

Along with the update, DivX also released several plugins for their Connected device. These plugins add support for Vimeo, Daily Motion, YouTube and for the first time ever, Hulu all on your TV set. After playing around with the update, I created a video of the software in action. In the clip, I detail the basic features of DivX Connected and give you the very first look at Hulu Connected in action.

I hope to provide an even more detailed review in the future, but this news was simply too exciting to ignore. If you haven’t already checked out DivX Connected, I would encourage you to take a closer look. There are a lot of media bridge devices out there, but few of them have seen the kind of support that DivX has been able to generate from the open source community. Between the work that the community is doing with the Connected SDK and the work that DivX continues to do behind the scenes, they’ve managed to turn a very niche product into one of the most robust consumer electronic devices on the market without Connected customers having to buy new equipment. Considering that Connected has been out for less then a year, it’s remarkable to see how far the product has come in such a short time. I hope that you enjoy the video and that you’ll stay tuned for a more detailed analysis later on.

Comments

[Matrixed:]

This box becomes more and more compelling. I recently upgraded my Tivo series 2 and standard TV to a 50" Samsung 1080i plasma and Comcast HDDVR. I keep the old setup in another room specifically for two reasons: Tivo does a great job with subscription and downloading of short format videos (CNET, The Onion, Break.com, NYT, etc) and for the ability to do sophisticated TV listing and subject searches.

Sounds like the Connected device is moving quickly to access all the online video possible.

You spoke about the horrible cable company UI that's been static for years -- how about a Connected plug-in with Tivo-like qualities to replace the crap cable company EPG? The hardware connection to force tune the TV would need to be figured out, but this would be a wonderful selling point as well.

2008 Sep 07 11:16 AM

[Mark Mays:]

Someone might wanna do some more 'fact finding' here for this article. They are not playing back flash video at all. But rather just using the RSS feeds from the sites like hulu, break, etc. to pull the raw video (not flash, IE; SWF) into DivX Connected.

2008 Sep 07 01:03 PM

[Mark Mays:]

Wow... me bad! Just read on the divx labs site and turns out that they are using SWF. Pretty cool!

2008 Sep 07 01:07 PM

[Mark Mays:]

Can someone clarify? Looks like the Flash content is not playing from the DivX Connected device at all, and looks like what it actually does is show the video playing from the desktop computer running the server (like remote desktop)? This would make more sense as it would then allow them to get around installing flash on the connected device.

2008 Sep 07 01:33 PM

[Short Cable:]

The DivX Connected box plays a stream from your PC. There is no local storage, and the PC does all of the processor intensive work. In this case rendering the SWF into the proper format.

2008 Sep 07 04:52 PM

[Scott Berry:]

Yes, this is correct. The Connected box is functionally not much more than a DivX codec paired with a WiFi card.

The server software on the PC converts everything (including photos and music, plus your stored video) into a DivX encoded stream which is sent to the client box. Because the PC does the heavy lifting, it's infinitely flexible and evolvable.

Brilliant idea, really, especially if they're successful in getting Connected embedded directly into TVs and DVRs.

2008 Sep 08 09:11 AM

[Onitenshu:]

just to clarify; DivX Connected only play streamed video in flash formats or other types of streams as well, like divx web player streams for example not every one of them has a divx video playing on them now like stagehd.com they also use xvid and for a short while allowed flash videos as a test example.

so what i'm asking is; are there other streaming websites allowed that don't use flash?

2008 Oct 03 09:31 PM