Intro
Stage6 - DivX's advanced rival to video-sharing sites such as YouTube - is now in its beta development phase. Bob Crabtree checks it out to see if the quality is as good as is claimed and to consider its prospects.
There are two main difference between Stage 6 and sites such as YouTube.
First, although Stage6 is quite at home with low-res video, it's also said to cater for high-definition footage up to 1080p.
We couldn't actually find any high-def video on Stage6 - even files that had the words "high definition" in the title weren't. So DivX, we think, needs to clearly signpost where to find HD footage. But even so, most Stage6 videos seem of a pretty decent resolution, making them a lot more watchable than a typical YouTube clip.
Of course, the quality of some sorts of videos is less important than others but where quality does count, Stage6 has a significant edge.
The second big plus for Stage6 is that it let's you download clips - not just view them over the web.
That means that you can watch them again when ever you want. That can be on a laptop (or desktop) computer running free DivX player software but it can also be on DivX-certified devices such as a DVD players, network media players and portable media players.
In addition, some clips have special playback features - such as interactive menu, chapter-points and multi-lingual sub-titles and sound-tracks - though, at the moment, these are accessible only when clips have been downloaded and we don't know whether the intention is to implement these features for video that's streaming from Stage6's site.
Stage6 also scores by having some effective online search tools. These let you drill down through search results - searching within searches.
Well, that's some of the theory, so let's go hands on...