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

That's just DivX backward.

I prefer extortion, the X makes it sound cool

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

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.

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

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