Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

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DivX - wow, that brings back memories of torrenting movies in the mid-00’s.

It really was the only way to get a balance of decent video quality with a reasonable (usually 700MB or less, for CD-video purposes) file size.

My computer was too weak to really play back said DivX files at the time (‘02? ‘03?) - so I would burn them and play them through my Dreamcast with a TV tuner card attached to my computer tower. (I didn’t have a TV of my own, but I had a computer monitor!)

The only other alternatives I knew of at the time were QuickTime (which got big fast when it was longer) and AVI, which; AFAIK, didn’t even use compression and was thusly huge.

It’s not a wonder that DivX is gone now; but for a while, it was just insanely prevelant.

DivX started life as hacked DLL for one of Microsoft's early MPEG-4 part 2 implementations. By default Microsoft only allowed its MPEG-4 codecs to be written to WMV/ASF containers. The hacked DLL let a DirectShow filter put the MPEG-4 bitstream in an AVI container. Later versions of the DivX codec were full implementations of the ISO MPEG-4 part 2 codec written from scratch. The nominal "DivX" file was an AVI with the DivX video codec and an MP3 audio track.

Unfortunately because the codec and format were all sort of hacked together there were lots of different combinations of various DivX, MS-MPEG-4, Windows Audio, and MP3 combinations floating around. In addition people would encode movies with all kinds of different settings trying to eek out a few extra minutes of video on a 700MB CD-R.

DivX tried to advertise itself as "the MP3 of video". It was really the clusterfuck of video that only worked because everyone just installed codec packs (K-lite or ffdshow) and hoped for the best.

I still use K-Lite to this day. Pretty funny how it has vastly outlived its namesake KaZaA: https://www.codecguide.com/changelogs_basic.htm

Thank you so much for this in-depth explanation. I understood that MPEG-4 had something to do with DivX, but could never understand why 'regular' media players couldn't interpret the files. This explains it!

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