![]() ![]() ![]() Should you be struggling to play an Xvid file, VLC Media Player is your best option-it can play a whole host of video formats and codecs without breaking a sweat, and if you’re unable to get your file open in this app, it may not be possible to open it at all. As we said, Xvid is something of a throwback, back to the times when we all put optical discs inside players rather than just clicking around inside a streaming app. There are even some DVD players that can play discs with Xvid files on them, though compatible hardware isn’t as common as it used to be. If you do find yourself with an Xvid file-which could be in a format like MP4 or AVI-then the good news is that it should be fairly easy to play on just about any device. New and improved video codecs such as H.264 (which is also based on MPEG-4, but a different part of it) have arrived and taken over, and unless you’re dealing with legacy files or a specific use case, you shouldn’t need to deal with Xvid.īut it’s that rarity in needing to deal with them that can make them confusing to handle, which is why we’re writing this guide. The Xvid codec has been around for more than 20 years now, and in truth isn’t used all that much any more. Handbrake is your best bet for video conversions. One basic example of such a trick would be only storing the differences between two video frames, rather than storing each frame in its entirety. This is done through a variety of tricks that the human eye can’t really see, in the same way that JPEG files reduce the size of images while keeping quality levels high ( enough). Xvid can reduce raw video files by as much as 200 times without any huge visible loss in quality. On the phones and laptops and websites of today, consumers aren’t really thinking about what format their videos are in or what compression algorithms they’re using (though the back-end developers most definitely still are). In those early days, every last byte mattered in terms of bandwidth or storage space, much more so than it does now-for that reason, codecs and their various technicalities were talked about a lot more too. These codecs and associated formats started to become much more widely used in the 2000s as computers and internet connections started becoming capable of working with serious amounts of video. Xvid is open source and available to use for free, which is a key part of its history: It was originally developed as a rival to the proprietary, not-free DivX, which is a term a lot of older video nerds will be familiar with. Xvid is based on the MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile compression format, on which codecs can be built (when we said there were extra complications we weren’t going to go into, this is one of them). With all that in mind, an Xvid file is therefore a video file that uses the Xvid codec-it doesn’t determine the file type or the extension you’ll see on the file, but rather how the video data is compressed. The term MPEG-4 for example, actually covers a whole range of standards that include a video format, video codecs, and more besides-you can see a full list and detailed explanation of each part of the name here. This can all quickly get confusing, especially as shorthand and abbreviations are used extensively. A great video codec will keep file sizes low while keeping the video quality high, which is what Xvid aims to do. The term codec is short for compression-decompression-it controls which bits of data are saved and which are cast off. The choice of codec determines various aspects of the video: Primarily, its quality, which then affects its file size. ![]() It’s actually even more complicated than this, but we’ll leave it there for the purposes of this article. A video file format such as AVI can support several different codecs. So what’s the difference? The format (or the container) sets certain standards for a video, including how it can be played, how audio and video get stored, how extras such as subtitles are handled, and which specific codecs are supported. Remembering Enterprise: The Test Shuttle That Never Flew to Space These Winning Close-Up Photos Show Life That's Often Overlooked ![]()
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