What is Divx Karaoke?

Each year we hear about another karaoke format. Once upon a time.... there was only the CDG format. Then came VCD players and the VCD Karaoke format was introduced. The VCD fomat is extremely popular in Asia. Then along came DVD players and of course the DVD Karaoke format came along with it. 

The MP3+g format then arrived offering 1000 songs on 1 DVD disc. This format never made it as you needed a special player to play the discs. Also the format was not well supported by disc manufacturers. 

Then Super CD+g was introduced. Essentially this is the same as a CDG but is on a DVD disc. The discs can be played in any PC with a DVD ROM and special players made by CAVS in the US. This format will probably make it as it is being well supported by nearly all the disc manufacturers.

Now a new format is being introduced. Its called Divx. In a nutshell it uses mpeg4 compression to create karaoke AVI files. The AVI files can be played on a PC or on Divx compatible DVD players. A typical CDG file is around 40 meg, the same file in Divx is around 10 meg. With the file size so small, hundreds of tracks (apparently up to 2000) can be loaded onto 1 DVD disc. Currently there are 3 Divx discs available, each with around 600 songs. Hopefully other manufacturers will pick up the new format and produce more discs. The Divx karaoke discs can play in a Divx compatible player and they work with the key changer. This means one of our Acesonic DGX-500 5 tray Divx players could be loaded up with 5 Divx discs and potentially you could have 5 discs x 2000 songs = 10,000 tracks! Imagine never having to change a disc all night!

It's early days for Divx and it will be interesting to see whether it lasts or "fizzes" out like mp3+g.