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DivX

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DivX
Developer(s)DivX, Inc.
Stable release
6.0.2 / 19 August 2005
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeMedia player / Codec / Media format
Websitewww.divx.com
This article is about the media format DivX. For the pay-per-view DVD system, see DIVX.

DivX® [daɪvˈeks] is a media format, including a codec, created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc.), known for its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining high visual quality. It has been the center of controversy because of its use in the replication and distribution of copyrighted DVDs. Many newer "DivX Certified" DVD players are able to play DivX movies.

"DivX" is not to be confused with "DIVX", an unrelated attempt at a new DVD rental system employed by the US retailer Circuit City. Early versions of DivX included only a codec, and were named "DivX ;-)", where the winking emoticon was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the failed DIVX system.

A typical feature-length movie on DVD is around 7 gigabytes in size; with DivX this can be compressed to around 700 megabytes which fits on a CD-ROM with minimal loss in quality. Various programs are available which can produce a DivX file from a normal video DVD (this process is known as "ripping"). The resulting file can then be stored on hard disk, burned on optical media, or shared on peer-to-peer networks.

History

DivX ;-) 3.11 Alpha and earlier versions generally refer to a hacked version of the Microsoft MPEG-4 Version 2 video codec, extracted around 1999 by French hacker Jerome Rota (also known as Gej). The Microsoft codec, which originally required that the compressed output be put in an ASF file, was altered to allow other containers such as AVI. From 1998 through 2002, independent enthusiasts within the DVD-ripping community created software tools which dramatically enhanced the quality of video files that the DivX ;-) 3.11 Alpha codec could produce. One notable tool is Nandub, a modification of the open-source VirtualDub, which features two-pass encoding (termed "Smart Bitrate Control" or SBC) as well as access to internal codec features.

In early 2000, Rota created a company (originally called DivXNetworks, Inc., renamed to DivX, Inc. in 2005) to improve DivX and steward its development. The company released a clean room version of the codec as DivX 4.0 in July 2001. DivX, Inc. has been granted patents on parts of the DivX codec, which is fully MPEG-4-Advanced Simple Profile compliant. The next major version, DivX 5.0, was released in March 2002.

The latest generation, DivX 6, was released on 15 June 2005 and expands the scope of DivX beyond "just a codec" to include a full media container format. DivX 6 introduces a new media file format (with a .divx extension) that includes support for the following DVD-like features:

  • Interactive video menus
  • Multiple subtitles
  • Multiple audio tracks
  • Chapter points
  • Other metadata

While in previous generations, DivX was analogous to video formats such as MPEG-2, in its 6.0 generation, DivX is more analogous to media container formats. Much in the way that media formats such as DVD specify MPEG-2 video as a part of their specification, DivX as a media format specifies MPEG-4-compatible video as a part of its specification.

Current situation

The current version of DivX (version 6.0.2) is available from DivX.com for Windows 2000/XP. The latest version of DivX for Macintosh is version 5.2.1, though a beta version of DivX 6 for Mac (minus the full media format functionality) is available at the DivX Labs web site.

The current version of DivX is neither free software nor open source, but an open source version of the codec—called OpenDivX®—was released by DivX in early 2001, and this version served as the basis for the open source XVID codec, the specification of which is maintained by an independent group. The format's main competitors in the for-license video compression software market are Microsoft's Windows Media Video series, Apple Computer's Quicktime, and the RealNetworks RealVideo series.

See also

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