DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc.), including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality. The DivX codec uses lossy MPEG-4 compression, where quality is balanced against file size for utility. It is one of several codecs commonly associated with "ripping", whereby audio and video multimedia are transferred to a hard disk and transcoded.
Futures
The DivX codec and DivX 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).
On the 6th of January 2009, DivX 7 was released, which added H.264 video, AAC audio and Matroska container support, surpassing the restrictions of their previous formats. The DivX Converter 7 still supports DivX 6 profiles, but DivX Plus HD needs to be selected to make a file in the new format. When using DivX 7 in the converter the only option available is to limit filesize, but a more configurable CLI client is available from DivX Labs. Since it can only create raw H.264 streams a Matroska muxer must be used.
Profiles
DivX has defined many profiles, which are sets of MPEG-4 features as determined by DivX. Because the grouping is different from what is specified in the MPEG-4 standard, there is a DivX-specific device certification process for device manufacturers. DivX's profiles differ from the standardized profiles of the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 international standard.
