Furrygoat, Are Codecs the Next DLL Hell?

His conclusions:

• Sharing between the laptop and MCE is easy
• UPNP is a myth. I just don’t believe it any more.
• Codecs are the next DLL hell

(Click through to read why/how he reached his conclusions).

Glad to see that your MCE+laptop scenario works. Though with your ‘UPNP is a myth’, is UPNP the myth or is the problem with the transcoding? Transcoding is not a a UPNP problem at all because UPNP is simply about device connectivity.

And yes, I totally agree that codecs are the next DLL hell. Our users are already hitting this problem when firstly they try and watch a DIVX/XVID video on MCE and realize that they need to install the proper codec. Now after they install the codec everything works until they then try and watch the video on their Extender and then discover that the Extender only has WMV 9 decoding and won’t do DIVX/XVID (uh, and it also doesn’t do WMV 8).

From all the reports I read from CES this year it sounds like there is a movement towards DIVX from CE companies, which is great, but nowadays the majority of my video content is XVID and so it’s not so great. DVIX/XVID/QT/WMV.. We (the users) need a winner which everyone will adopt and put an end to codec hell.

See also: Codec’s = New Age DLL Hell? Hell Yes