Posted 11/11/08 at 10:21:48 AM by Paul Lilly

DivX has begun offering its upcoming DivX Player 7.0 in Beta 1 form, and with it support for MKV files containing high definition H.264 video and surround sound AAC audio.

DivX has been playing around with H.264 support for some time now as part of its "Rémoulade" project, but this marks the first player release to incorporate this capability. DivX says the player's H.264 video decoding will come with support for Baseline, Main, High, High 10, and High 4:2:2 profiles, full interlace support, multithreading decoding on up to 8 CPU cores, and optimizations for MMX, SSE, and SSE2 instruction sets.

The release will also contain several general improvements over the currently shipping DivX Player 6.8.2, including wider Direct3D videocard compatibility, the return of the GDI renderer allowing the player to display video when no hardware acceleration is available, and better handling of AVI files that have a broken index, and improved support for media created with the company's DivX Author application.

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