An unintentionally amusing article with 3ivx's CEO

In another My First MPEG-4 Article, the German site 99mac interviews 3ivx about their “miracle” 3ivx codec. The interviewer (conducting the interview via email, apparently) quotes Happy Machines’ CEO, Jan Devos, verbatim.

Happy Machines is a company that was formed in July 2000 as the official entity for developing and marketing the 3ivx codec, the goal being, using multi-dimensional mathematical compression algorithms combined with educated predictions and subjective post-processing filters relating to the way the human eye perceives and responds to movement, the development of a complex but efficient cross platform natural video encoder/decoder.

Sounds fancy. I’ll translate: “We have an MPEG-4 Video codec.”

Then there’s the problem of Mr. Devos not having any idea what the competition is going. The CEO takes a dig at DivX for being a “hacked” (it was more of a repackaging, really) version of MS MPEG-4, but that hasn’t been true for a couple of years. He says that Happy Machine’s goal was to exceed DivX in all important areas, apparently not realizing that DivX has a very good MPEG-4 Video codec that 3ivx probably can’t match.

He also doesn’t seem to understand that QuickTime 6 has an MPEG-4 Video codec of its own — they actually submitted the current 3ivx release for QuickTime’s component auto-download feature. It was rejected (of course!), but he promises to “try again” with the next release.

Performance (speed). Image quality. Interoperability. Portability. The uniqueness of the 3ivx Delta technology is that excellent results are achieved in all of these areas, without sacrificing one area for another.

Riiight. This is not a man who’s done software development, then.

Oh, and they’re not quite at the point where they make MPEG-4 files. But they could if they wanted to, the CEO assures us. | 99mac interview


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