Welcome to the DivX Wizards Portal!

DivX is a video codec created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc.), which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality. DivX uses lossy MPEG-4 Part 2 compression, where quality is balanced against file size for utility. It is one of several codecs commonly associated with ripping, where audio and video multimedia are transferred to a hard disk and transcoded. As a result, DivX has been a 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 encoded movies, however, "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.

Current Version
The current version of DivX (version 6.1.1) is available from DivX.com for Windows 2000/XP. The latest version of DivX for Mac OS X is version 6.0.0, released December 8th, 2005. The DivX codec and Player are available for free at the DivX website. Paying customers can access additional features of the DivX codec in the registered version, known as DivX Pro, and can also use DivX Converter, a one-click encoding application as a revamp of Dr. DivX and associated encoding tools (such as the Electrokompressiongraph™, or EKG, which helped increase the viewability of highly compressed high-motion scenes).

Recently DivX have also previewed the DivX Browser Plug-In via the DivX Labs website, demonstrating 720p HD playback live inside major browsers for Windows and Mac OS. Development of Dr DivX 2, an Open Source DivX transcoding application, has also begun.

A preview of version 7 of the DivX coded has been released by DivX Labs. Like Windows Media Video codec, this is also a multithreaded codec. As such, it provides noticeable performance increase in multiprocessor systems.

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 source code of which is maintained by an independent group.

The 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.

Are YOU ready for DivX?

After a long, exhausting day you came home, had your dinner and then sat in front of the TV looking for a nice relaxing movie. Nothing! Then
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