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Oh god, DivX.. I had almost forgotten. Lets write a new video compression algorithm that is super efficient - great this lets us compress movies so they can
by briffle 3y ago
Oh god, DivX.. I had almost forgotten.
Lets write a new video compression algorithm that is super efficient - great
this lets us compress movies so they can fit on cheap CD's, instead of DVDs. - great
We can now give those CD's away with movies on them - great
And then every time someone puts one in a DivX player they can pay us to watch/rent it, instead of having to drive to blockbuster - wait, what?
Its easy, we'll just use a phone line that everyone has right near their entertainment center in their living room to phone home at night and send the data of what movies you watched and how many times. - what are they smoking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
- nly 3y agoI think you're confusing DivX the codec and DIVX the disc media platform. Afaict these aren't related. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DivX
- _aavaa_ 3y agoHow in the world were they both able to use that name?
- pavlov 3y agoDIVX the physical disc distribution company was a famous flop. DivX the video codec started out as an unlicensed hacked version of Microsoft’s MPEG-4 v3 codec binary. Since it wasn’t a commercial product and was legally dubious, the author called it DivX ;-) with the smiley in the name. When it became unexpectedly popular during the dot-com boom time, someone of course set up a DivX company that dropped the smiley, eventually rewrote the codec, and presumably acquired the trademark from the defunct DIVX (or just took it over if the registration expired, I don’t know).
- chasd00 3y ago> and presumably acquired the trademark from the defunct DIVX (or just took it over if the registration expired, I don’t know). and then, iirc, this is where xvid come into being. I think it was the same codec just re-written and given back to the opensource world, hence the reason for naming it "divx" spelled backwards.
- nntwozz 3y agoLet's not forget to add Xvid to this circus, having X in your name was all the rage back in the early 2000s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvid
- doubled112 3y agoThat's just DivX backward.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zerocrates 3y agoThe MPEG-4 Visual space was kind of a mess.
- joenot443 3y agoWhat a throwback! Only now am I realizing that Xvid is the OSS counterpart to Divx. This is one part of 2000s tech I'm happy to have mostly forgotten about.
- wlesieutre 3y agoCompared to 2024, when of course nobody would throw away an enormous amount of existing brand awareness to have an X for their product name
- ta1243 3y agoI prefer extortion, the X makes it sound cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG6vgzAswgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG6vgzAswgE
- devonkim 3y agoXtreme marketing was absolutely going on back then - remember the Mountain Dew ad campaigns? Yeah....
- doubled112 3y agoTo make the waters murkier, there were also DVD players with DivX (MPEG4) codec support. You could encode a CD sized video file, burn it, and watch it.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoI definitely watched _Hackers_ on my PS2 on a burned CD-R. The quality was not great
- johnhenry 3y agoThey are somewhat related... the codec's title styling included a winking smiley face emoji -- "DivX ;-)" -- as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the failed video disk technology.
- Gormo 3y agoThey're not related directly, but the codec was specifically named in reference to the media format.
- evan_ 3y agoDivX disks were DVDs.