Very first paragraph:
The first really good video codec was MPEG-4 H.264. I remember in 2001 my housemate watching a movie on his telly — playing off a CD-R. A whole movie crammed onto a CD, encoded with DivX!
DivX was an implementation of MPEG-4 ASP, also known as H.263. H.264 came much later with x264 being the most well-known encoder (hence its name).
ASP in my opinion never got the biggest chance to shine with regards to quality because the target medium was often the CD which limited file size to 700MB, and once DVDs became an option, people went back to MPEG-2 because that’s what the players were all compatible with. Sometimes even (S)VCDs were used still. Standalone players with ASP support came rather later.
I wouldn’t say it didn’t get a chance to shine (unless you’re being pedantic and referring strictly to the official spec) - it’s various implementations such as DivX and XviD were widely used and extremely popular on the web back then. Yes, even though DVDs and DVD writers became common, internet speeds were still too slow and uncapped internet was fairly uncommon, so most people preferred to download those 700MB rips. In fact, aXXo’s 700MB XviD rips were extremely popular due to their relatively high quality for those sizes, and anyone who’s sailed the high seas back then would tell you that DivX/XviDs generally had the highest seeds for any given video, thereby indicating their popularity.
DivX-certified media players were also a thing for this very reason - and they weren’t even obscure, pretty much every popular HT OEMs had DivX-compatible players - eg Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, Philips, Pioneer etc. And this was back in the early 2000s, so I wouldn’t say that the support came “rather later”. DivX (the first official release, not the bootleg version with the winky face), along with XviD, were born in 2001, and certified hardware players followed only a couple of years later. But don’t forget that HTPCs were also a thing back then, heck, they date back to the late 90s when PC makers started selling PCs with TV tuner or “combo” cards buit in, and I recall them being specifically marketed as HTPCs. Even after DVD players became cheap and popular, HTPCs were still preferred by the enthusiast crowd due to better video quality, wider codec support and flexibility. Essentially, playing ASPs was never really a big deal for people who consumed the format.
So overall, I’d say that ASP not only shined, it dominated. Without ASP, groups like aXXo would’ve probably not existed, and the scene would’ve looked very, very different.
Reiterating why I find so many magazine to be trash nowadays.
Overly set up for SEO, poorly researched and often just crammed with shitty ads. That they completely neglected the formats used by pirating and home content speaks volumes.
That’s why I now often prefer to just look up stuff on enthusiast forums, Reddit or to some extent Lemmy. The last hasn’t gotten as good of an integration with search engines.
I encoded everything I could get my hands on with ASP. I was storing it on hard disks so size was a very little concern.
It was amazingly good at shrinking the size of low motion dark movies and cartoons with relatively little loss to quality. If you cropped the video to one of the magic numbers it supported You could get away with some astounding results.
But raising the bit rate on it usually yielded marginally poor results. Even running bit rates relatively close to raw MP4 yielded The same artifacts in high motion that you saw in the much lower bit rates.
I occasionally ran across movies that didn’t work well with it. I probably spent three months trying to get a really nice encode of The Fifth Element. The movie checked all the normal boxes It was relatively dark it had relatively few background motion scenes. But VBR at 1500 and CBR at much higher rates, is asteroids in the opening scenes just turned into a rave and the chase scenes stuttered like hell. To be fair the 1500 VBR was super super tiny. For the size the quality was very impressive, just not archive worthy. But you could pump it up to 6 gigs which was bigger than the original MPEG, and it just failed to touch the quality of the original disc.
