The technology has been flying under the radar for a while, but that will end in a few months, when DivX-compatible DVD players will flood the market. How did all this happen so smoothly?
Best online Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Certification at certkingdom.com - Free MCTS TrainingThe DivX story began with a 1998 initiative called Digital Video Express—Divx for short. It was invented by Circuit City and a Los Angeles–based entertainment law firm (a weird combination of partners, to be sure). At the time, Disney, DreamWorks, Panasonic, Paramount, Universal, Zenith, and a few others agreed to back the new system. It's too bad the public wasn't interested.
The idea was that you would buy a special Divx-enabled DVD player that connected to your phone line. When you put in a special disposable DVD/Divx disc, a central database would monitor when you played the disc. So if you paid for a one-day rental, you'd have a limited time to watch it. After that, it wouldn't play. And you never had to bother returning it. The idea was convoluted to say the least. I think the landfill issues alone were enough to stop the initiative.
The controversy over the wacky discs resulted in the Divx name emerging years later as the moniker for a home-brew compression technology that was initially called DivX ;). The winking emoticon mocked the previous product. The emoticon was later dropped.
DivX ;) was actually derived from some Windows Media Player code floating around in beta. Around 1999, French hacker Jerome Rota (also called Gej) found a codec embedded in the Microsoft product that was actually an MPEG-4–compatible process. He pulled it from the code, and it got passed around the underground as DivX ;).
Gej needed something to compress files so they could be transferred easily. Those in the underground saw it as a way to trade movies—and they did. Luckily for Hollywood, even movies compressed to the max were still 700MB or more.
This is where the story gets interesting. Gej eventually got some decent funding and formed a company called DivXNetworks. Soon after, a clean-room version of the codec was developed, making any commercial version of DivX not bound by the myriad MPEG-4 patents. In the meantime, as DivXNetworks CEO Jordan Greenhall told me, "All the MPEG-4 software companies were going out of business, and we ended up being the last man standing."
This probably happened because Hollywood didn't move to MPEG-4 from MPEG-2 and its lucrative DVD business. MPEG-4 lost momentum, while DivX stayed lean and mean. MPEG-4 now appears to be relegated to encoding for disc-based camcorders.
The trick that will really give a boost to DivX is its ability to stream DivX-encoded video at 784 Kbps, allowing for DVD-quality streaming. With a broadband connection, you can download a movie in less than half the movie's playing time.
In contrast to the bumblings of the Recording Industry Association of America with the MP3 fiasco, the Motion Picture Association of America has been working with—not against—the DivXNetworks folks. How this will play out nobody knows. But Greenhall, an MP3.com veteran, knows the pitfalls and is going to steer away from controversy and litigation.
With DivX beginning to appear in DVD players later this year, the next stage of video compression development is already under way. DivXNetworks is working on H.264, a standard that compresses video by as much as 75 percent. The company believes that using such compression, a DVD stream can be pushed over the Internet at a magic 384 Kbps. This also bodes well for the future of high-definition compression and, eventually, high-definition video streams.
In the meantime, according to the company, the public has downloaded 100 million (yes, that's right) copies of various free DivX players that it offers on its Web site at www.divx.com. The DVD manufacturers are in for a surprise with the popularity of DivX. By this time next year, DivX will be in the public lexicon.
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