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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

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

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I 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

How in the world were they both able to use that name?

DIVX 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).

> 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.

Let'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

That's just DivX backward.

The MPEG-4 Visual space was kind of a mess.

What 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.

Compared to 2024, when of course nobody would throw away an enormous amount of existing brand awareness to have an X for their product name

I prefer extortion, the X makes it sound cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG6vgzAswgE

Xtreme marketing was absolutely going on back then - remember the Mountain Dew ad campaigns? Yeah....

To 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.

I definitely watched _Hackers_ on my PS2 on a burned CD-R. The quality was not great

They 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.

They're not related directly, but the codec was specifically named in reference to the media format.

DivX disks were DVDs.

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