Panasonic including DivX Plus HD (MKV) support into next gen Blu-ray players, TVs
By Richard Lawler 
posted Sep 11th 2009 4:42PM
posted Sep 11th 2009 4:42PM
Nearly a year after Panasonic stepped the UniPhier chips at the heart of its Blu-ray players up to DivX HD, comes word that the company is moving on up to DivX Plus HD (read: Up to 1080p h.264 video in an MKV container) next time around. That includes not only its next line of Blu-ray set-top players we're sure to see unveiled at CES, but also digital TVs and in-car players, so between Panasonic and NEC MKV fans should be able to take their videos even more places without the extra step of transcoding in 2010.
Nice to see that more and more support widely popular pirate format mkv.
At one point DivX alone was associated mostly with pirating and people were asking the same questions about why companies were incorporating DivX playback in their dvd players. mkv is the best container for high quality video. Pirates just adopted it the fastest and dvd manufacturers are playing catch up.
I'm not sure why legitimate companies would support MKV. 99% of the content that is available in the MKV container is from pirated sources. What do they have to gain by this?
My purchase.
Three issues with your comment:
1. Manufacturers of hardware don't have any good reason to care about copyright infringement save for the risk of content producers not cooperating with them. At this point, they're adopting the format (Blu-ray) the content producers have demanded, so from their point of view, the content producers can just suck it. "Don't like MKV? That's not your choice, and if you start forcing us to remove it, well, we might just stop making BD players."
2. MKV is only a de-facto pirate standard because it's becoming the de-facto non-MPEG container format. You might just as well have made the same complaint a few years ago about AVI, MOV, or WMV support.
3. DivX is more than MKV/AVI and H.264/ASP (new/old respectively.) It's also now got a DRM layer, so actually an increasing amount of "legitimate" (ie sold-by-Hollywood) content will be coming out in DivX format. So, in furtherance to (2) above, you might just as well complain about Blu-ray players supporting H.264, the most popular pirate format!
It's a shame H.264, MP3, and The Internet are all heavily used by pirates, it's so hard to find anyone who'll manufacture anything that supports those systems these days ;-)
This is a welcome and logical addition for DivX "certified" devices. MKV is just a container format. "DivX Plus HD" specifies codecs and other constraints as well, so much of the pirated material floating around won't be directly compatible. Furthermore, there are tons of pirated MP3 files in circulation, but that hasn't prevented almost every media playback device available these days from supporting MP3 has it?
What audio formats are being used in these DivX Plus HD MKV files? The H.264 1080p video I can live with, but I'm not happy without losselss HD Audio.
"DivX Plus HD" certification basically means support for DivX 7 (as well as earlier DivX versions). DivX 7 is basically a MKV container with H.264 video and AAC audio. No lossless audio is included in the DivX specs. I suppose a manufacture would be free to add lossless audio support if they wanted to, but I doubt that will happen soon since the only common source for lossless audio at this time is Blu-Ray.
Panasonic are being a little lazy with their Blu-ray players.
Do they not know what Samsung is doing?
Give us a Blu-ray player with built-in Wi-Fi for streaming directly from our computer. That's what we really want.
Anything else is old hat.
Now this has my attention. If I can network it and stream mkvs to it also, then i'll be first in line for one.