DivX Video Format Explained

There's a company called DivX, Inc, formerly thehis video resume which could not play on the new
DivXNetworks, Inc. that introduced the DivX family ofWindows Media Player at that time,
video codecs. Made extremely popular because of itsreverse-engineered the MPEG4 format together with
ability to produce high quality video using lossy MPEG4a German Hacker Max Morice to come up with an
Part2 compression or MPEG4 ASP, DivX hasMPEG4 format encapsulated in AVI instead of the
cemented itself as one of the most popular multimediaASF it originally had. It only took them a week.
codec for the home market.Between 1998 and 2002, the DVD hacking community
DivX is known to create a balance between qualityhad independent hackers enhance the format that
and file size with its highly efficient compression abilities.later came to have the Divx with a smiley emoticon
And because of that, it s one of the codecs used for attached as version 3.0.
ripping where audio and video are copied from aIn 2000, Rota was hired by Jorda Greenhall to form a
source to the PC hard disk for archiving andcompany called DivXNetworks (later renamed to DivX,
transcoding.Inc.) based in the French Riviera. The association
The commercial DivX competes with Microsoft'sresulted in the OpenDivX codec a year later. Its source
Video for Windows in WMV, Apple's QuickTime in thecode was open to anyone and could be downloaded
MOV and RealNetwork's Real Video in the RMM filefrom the website. The following year, the two left for
formats. An open source version released by XvidSan Diego and developed the OpenDivX software to
solutions in 2001 is the Xvid file format.become DivX version 4.0. Other developers took the
While DivX has long been renowned for its excellentEncore2 software to enhance the open source
video quality, its free and open source equivalent XvidOpenDivX to arrive at the rival Xvid format.maintained
today offers comparable quality, also based onby Xvid Solutions, Inc.
MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 ASP). In a series ofThe DivX Company continued to enhance the DivX
subjective quality tests at Doom9.org, the DivX codecsoftware that in 2002 has taken on the fifth version.
has been successively beaten by Xvid every yearBy 2004, the features of the DivX format are as
since 2003.[11]complete as we know it today. In May 2007, the
Confusion clarifiedWindows Vista version DivX 6.6 for the PC and the
DivX are two different things from two differentMac was released.
companies. One is DIVX created by Circuit City, a USThe advantages and benefits of using DivX
electronics retail giant that attempted to market a DVDDivX found itself at the heart of video piracy in the late
rental system that used special players and discs. And90s as its format became widely popular for ripping
the other is the DivX multimedia codec trademarkedcopyrighted DVD materials for bootleg replication and
and marketed by DivX, Inc. which is actually adistribution. A number of generic DVD players as well
reference to the failed Circuit City system.as branded ones are claiming to play DivX materials.
A short historyWhat's so appealing about the format is that it's free.
DivX roots can be traced back to 1998 as a hackedSame with the software players you can use to play it
version of Microsoft's MPEG4 version 3 which iswith. It belongs to the open source community together
inferior to the MPEG4 that we know today. It was awith Xvid offering competitive if not better quality.
French hacker Jerome Rota who, rather than modify