DivX ;-) -Cheap, High Quality Distribution for Your Video

A few years back, Circuit City introduced DIVX, a DVD player that viewers used on a pay-per-view basis. This technology drew criticism and quickly faded from the scene leaving buy-out DVDs to reign supreme.
However, Jerome Rota, a French computer hacker, remembered the name, and brought it back to life as the moniker for a video codec he hacked from Microsoft software. The emoticon ;-) denotes a sideways "wink wink, nudge nudge" about
the pirated aspects of the codec. DivX;-) has gained most of its
publicity from its use as an efficient means for delivering stolen movies. However, it may be more important, in the long run, as the herald of a new family of tools for delivering high quality video quickly and cheaply through the Internet and other media. This is the family
of codecs built upon the MPEG-4 compression standard.

How it Works

In a nutshell, DivX;-), and the MS-MPEG-4 code it pilfered, use MPEG-4 compression. This may take some of the mystique out of DivX;-), but it is the reason why it's so efficient.
MPEG-4 is a standard recently set (in October 1998) for compressing media files. This standard was brought to us by the same committee of the International Standards Organization, the Motion Pictures Experts Group that set previous MPEG standards. Examples of their work are MPEG-1, chiefly used for compressing video for low resolution delivery from CDs or the Net; and more recently MPEG-1, Layer 3 (nicknamed "MP3") for compressing audio files. MPEG-2 has become the industry standard for delivering high bandwidth digital video, as through DBS satellite and DVD.
The astonishing accomplishment of the MPEG-4 specification is its ability to deliver high quality video and audio at a fraction of the bandwidth and file size of MPEG-2.
Since the setting of this specification, various companies proceeded to build codecs (compressor-decompressors) based on it. Companies like e-Vue to date have concentrated on using the spec as set by the ISO without enhancements. Microsoft itself has released a reference-standard ISO MPEG-4 video codec in Windows Media Technologies 7. However, Microsoft has also taken the lead in developing proprietary enhancements to the spec that would optimize the quality-bandwidth ratio beyond what the basic standard allows. It is a codec built on one of Microsoft's early enhancements, MS-MPEG-4, that somehow found its way into the heart of DivX;-). Since the release of MS-MPEG-4, Microsoft continued to develop its codec, however. A Microsoft spokesperson now claims that the MPEG-4-based Windows Media Video 7 codec improves quality and efficiency 20% over the old MS-MPEG-4 codec. Rota and company themselves have apparently moved beyond their DivX;-) novelty release into writing, from the ground up, legitimate codecs based on enhancements to the MPEG-4 standard of their own, such as DivX;-) Deux. For information on the next generation of DivX;-) products, visit www.projectmayo.com.

What it Means to Yo…