Rockbox and Xvid - eternal contradiction?

[Anvil2k12]

this forum and the web made it quite clear
over the years about avi and Rockbox
- "No, No, No", but that's not really satisfying.

I am still missing someone giving me a
decent loyality related or technical reason!

I'd like to understand why I am forced to recode
all Xvid into mpg for the purpose watching
them on my Iriver or Cowon with Rockbox.

Xvid is an open source either, this codec
is available in most other small devices -
Archos, Sony, Trekstor etc,  in many mobile
DVB-tellies and even Apple got an Xvid component
for QuickTime.

I'd like to know why Rockbox developers refrain
from taking that into account hence slightly
spoiling this extraordinary playing software
by a penny!

regards
Damian

[nls]

The main reason is that no one has put in the effort needed to make a plugin able of playing other video formats than mpg or adding them to the mpegplayer plugin.

As i understand it these are the two main reasons for that not happening:
1) The current mpegplayer is struggling with fullscreen video playback with 24fps on many targets and xvid is afaik more complex than mpeg2 so it will likely be slower.
2) Decoding and downscaling larger resolutions on the fly is prohibiitively slow on most targets so you will often need to downscale the videos anyway for a good experience, when doing that using a different codec like mpeg is trivial.

[Anvil2k12]

cheers nls,

but it may worth a reconsideration
times have changed regarding speed and
disk space.

if you look e.g. at a small Archos 28 IT now - it delivers
on a small scale what even a whole big desktop are still
doing nowadays.

small screens are good for rescaled cartoons like
American Dad and South Park and also video clips.
nobody who wants to be taken serious is watching
e.g. 'Blade Runner' on it anyway.

but I'd be nice to have at least cartoons and music videos
always in full scale with you instead of an elsewhere useless
small copy. always be ready to plug it in other peoples
large screens via USB or Vid out and a backup either.

regards
Damian

[gevaerts]

There's literally nothing to reconsider. If someone submits a patch to add xvid support in a clean way, it will be added. That was the case five years ago, and it's still the case now.

[gbl08ma]

Not to talk about the fact that the Xvid/[insert complex video format here] decoder code available for porting to Rockbox might not be compatible with the licence Rockbox is distributed under, or be so complex (in terms of code amount) that will produce a too big .rock file (being unpractical to ship with the official builds). And don't forget that despite "times have changed", the devices Rockbox is compatible with are not so powerful (i.e. they don't contain a full x86 computer CPU in them, nor 2GB DDR RAMs) - they are small devices designed to play music, and at most some short videos, on their tiny screen.

[bluebrother]

The Ipods have a CPU runnung at 80 MHz, the Iriver players a bit more. All those CPUs don't have a floating point unit and there is nohardeare acceleration for the video. Try decoding an xvid ona similarly equipped PC and you'll quickly know why xvid is not feasible.

[torne]

Most of the devices you refer to as being able to play mpeg4 have special hardware for decoding it; they are not doing it in software.