The DivX story

The DivX is a software tool that compress and decompress video data . As you can see the "Codec" word derives just from the fusion of the terms Coder and Decoder. The first version of this revolutionary codec was planned in the Microsoft laboratories and was called DIV (Digital Internet Video), the objective was to create a system in order to diffuse video files on Internet. Subsequently the DIV became MPEG-4 but the low quality of the images, instead the compression was good, did not concur with this system to take off. The files compressed with this codec had extension ASF. The project was abandoned. Subsequently a french cracker, Jerome Rota, succeeded to extract the code of the MPEG-4 and to create a codec able to compress AVI files and that was completely compatible with MPEG-4. Rota had just invented the DivX. The clean version of the codec was produced and distributed by the DivXNetworks, company founded by the same Rota. The quality of the DivX format is remarkably better then MPEG-4 and also the compression features are amazing: an entire movie can be compressed in 600/700 Mb. The possible applications of the codec are various. We can use high quality movies occupying no much space for multimedia applications and the sharing on Internet. We can compress a movie recorded with the digital video camera and then create a VideoCD. We can make a backup copy of our preferred DVD. We can record a television show (using a TV card for PC) using no much space on the HD. The DivX is not an OpenSource project, instead its source code cannot be used neither be manipulated from other coders. But an OpenSource version of the DivX was originally released by the same DivXNetworks under the name of OpenDivX from which the XviD project is been born then managed by a group of independent coders.