What's so great about DivX?

You hear a lot about H.264, VP6, and MPEG-4 these days. They are all high quality video codecs that are popular on the web and used extensively by Earthtalk Studios. But what about the DivX video codec? How does it stack up in the mix?

DivX (MPEG-4 Part 2) was originally made famous due to it's remarkable ability to compress big MPEG-2 video files into small DivX .avi files, without sacrificing noticeable quality loss. DivX can take a feature-length film from DVD and fit it on a CD-ROM. That means it can take 4 gigs and compress it down to 700 MB (aka 0.7 gigs or 83% less)--truly amazing. Therefore, DivX became a major pioneer of MPEG-4.

In today's slew of video codecs, DivX still stacks up. The DivX team has now incorporated H.264 into their new codec, and is braving new terrain in the codec world.

The DivX team has made strides in broadening their global reach. Over 100 million DivX Certified DVD players have been shipped worldwide--that's about 32% of all DVD players. This means that DivX content will play on these DVD players, along with traditional DVDs. DivX content can also be played on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and other HD media players that connect directly to the home theater.

The DivX codec and encoding application are available from www.divx.com. The DivX Converter makes it as easy as drag-and-drop for anyone to compress their personal video files into small, high-quality DivX files. DivX has defined profiles for compressing DivX video, from mobile to home theater to high def, to ensure that the resulting DivX file will be compatible with the destination device.

The DivX Web Player enables the embedding of DivX video on blogs, personal web pages, social networking sites, etc. And when viewing HD video on the web, unlike the Flash plugin, the DivX Web Player offers smooth video playback with much lower processor demand--meaning that more computers can play HD DivX video than HD Flash video.

Finally, DivX video is all about the important the 3-screen experience. It plays on mobile devices, computers, and TVs. We find the DivX format to be a viable forward-looking video codec, and hope to see development and adoption of the codec to continue well into the future. The video below is embedded using the DivX Web Player. You'll notice that when you watch it, the desktop begins to dim. This nice feature is built in to the DivX web player (and can be turned off as well).