DivX Video Format Explained

There's a company called DivX, Inc, formerly theWindows Media Player at that time,
DivXNetworks, Inc. that introduced the DivX familyreverse-engineered the MPEG4 format together with
of video codecs. Made extremely popular because ofa German Hacker Max Morice to come up with an
its ability to produce high quality video using lossyMPEG4 format encapsulated in AVI instead of the
MPEG4 Part2 compression or MPEG4 ASP, DivX hasASF it originally had. It only took them a week.
cemented itself as one of the most popularBetween 1998 and 2002, the DVD hacking
multimedia codec for the home market.community had independent hackers enhance the
DivX is known to create a balance between qualityformat that later came to have the Divx with a
and file size with its highly efficient compressionsmiley emoticon  attached as version
abilities. And because of that, it s one of the codecs3.0.
used for ripping where audio and video are copiedIn 2000, Rota was hired by Jorda Greenhall to form a
from a source to the PC hard disk for archiving andcompany called DivXNetworks (later renamed to
transcoding.DivX, Inc.) based in the French Riviera. The
The commercial DivX competes with Microsoft'sassociation resulted in the OpenDivX codec a year
Video for Windows in WMV, Apple's QuickTime in thelater. Its source code was open to anyone and could
MOV and RealNetwork's Real Video in the RMM filebe downloaded from the website. The following year,
formats. An open source version released by Xvidthe two left for San Diego and developed the
solutions in 2001 is the Xvid file format.OpenDivX software to become DivX version 4.0.
While DivX has long been renowned for its excellentOther developers took the Encore2 software to
video quality, its free and open source equivalentenhance the open source OpenDivX to arrive at the
Xvid today offers comparable quality, also based onrival Xvid format.maintained by 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 DivXsoftware that in 2002 has taken on the fifth version.
codec has been successively beaten by Xvid everyBy 2004, the features of the DivX format are as
year 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 aDivX found itself at the heart of video piracy in the
DVD rental system that used special players andlate 90s as its format became widely popular for
discs. And the other is the DivX multimedia codecripping copyrighted DVD materials for bootleg
trademarked and marketed by DivX, Inc. which isreplication and distribution. A number of generic DVD
actually a reference to the failed Circuit City system.players as well as branded ones are claiming to play
A short historyDivX materials.
DivX roots can be traced back to 1998 as a hackedWhat's so appealing about the format is that it's free.
version of Microsoft's MPEG4 version 3 which isSame with the software players you can use to play
inferior to the MPEG4 that we know today. It was ait with. It belongs to the open source community
French hacker Jerome Rota who, rather than modifytogether with Xvid offering competitive if not better
his video resume which could not play on the newquality.