If you're a bit old, you probably know what DivX is and you enjoyed it a lot in the early 2000s. If you're younger, this article will help you discover what DivX is, which is sort of the "MP3 of video". DivX is a revolutionary codec that shook up the beginning of this century... at least when it comes to watching movies at home.
A codec is not a file format: it is a software, based on a certain algorithm, that allows the coding and decoding of a certain type of content (in the case of DivX, video). And this codec in particular was revolutionary, because it allowed to compress, while maintaining a very acceptable quality, the films that were already circulating at the time on DVDs. From there, we could therefore have films in correct quality for a total size around 700 MB and therefore small enough to be burned on CDs.
And of course, if movies are now small enough to fit on a CD, they are also small enough to be streamed on Internet by download applications Emerging P2Ps, such as eMule or Kazaa, which were all the rage at the time. In short, a hard blow for the film industry.
A short history of DivX
It was in Montpellier, France (cock-a-doodle-doo), around 1999 that Jérôme Rota (under the pseudonym Gej), a 26-year-old software developer and graphic designer, decided to hack a Microsoft video compression codec, MPEG-4v3, after having problems playing his AVI videos in the latest version of Windows Media Player. Instead of converting the videos to ASF format, as required by Microsoft's proprietary codec, Rota decided to hack the codec so that it supported other video containers, such as AVI (Audio video Interleave).
A week later, the hack was successful, allowing him to create his own video compression codec: “DivX 😉”.
Yes, the smiley was, at the time, part of the name; beyond the joke, it was a useful detail to specify that it was not "Divx" (with a lowercase "x" for Digital video express), an attempt at a video rental system via the Internet which flopped at the end of the 20th century.
Armed with this technology, Jérôme Rota then joined forces with Jordan Greenhall at the beginning of 2000 to create the company DivXNetworks Inc. and develop from scratch an MPEG-4 codec that would remain compatible with Microsoft's codec.
The DivX codec is not under a free license. So in 2001, DivXNetworks released a public version called OpenDivX, an open source project (albeit with a restrictive license) whose code was available on the site projectmayo.com. Fun fact: the "mayo" comes from "mayonnaise", because according to Rota, mayonnaise and its codec were "French and difficult to manufacture".
In early 2001, one of DivXNetworks' employees created aa new version of the OpenDivX encoding algorithm, called again2. Although the code was published for a short time on projectmayo.com, it was suddenly removed…
The company stopped updating its public repository and announced that "what the community really wants is a WinAmp, not a Linux." DivXNetworks then released again2 under the name DivX 4.0 100% proprietary software with no "smiley". In parallel, the OpenDivX community of contributors also relied on again2 to publish its own codec, Xvid, now under the GNU license.
Over time, new codecs and formats (such as Microsoft's WMV) took over, offering greater efficiency and quality than DivX/Xvid, and interest in the revolutionary codec gradually died out during the first decade of this century. For example, Stage6, a potential DivX-based competitor to YouTube, shut down in 2008.
In 2011, DivX Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks) was acquired by Rovi Corporation, which sold it in 2014 to Blackstone Group, which sold it in 2015 to IPTVNeuLion. While several of DivX's intellectual property assets were sold in 2018 to Fortess Investment Group, DivX Inc. continues to occasionally update a video player for Windows and macOS called DivXSoftware (and which carries adware)
In conclusion, the DivX video codec was a resounding success in the early 2000s, allowing movies to be compressed to acceptable quality for a reduced file size, which made it possible to distribute them over the Internet through P2P download applications. However, over time, newer, more efficient codecs and formats took over, leading to a decline in interest in DivX. Nevertheless, this codec will remain in history as a pioneer in the world of video compression, and its creation by a French developer from Montpellier, Jérôme Rota, is a great proof of the innovative and creative spirit that drives the world of technology.
