“The developers of hacker video technology DivX are going
public, opening up much of their work to the open source
community….”
“DivX has been touted by some as the technology that could do
for video online what MP3 did for music.”
“The technology itself doesn’t allow hackers to break through
the anti-copying protections on DVDs. But used in conjunction with
technologies that do facilitate this, DivX allows full movies to be
transmitted relatively quickly online and stored on a single CD.
The compressed files retain the quality of a good VCR picture or
better.”
“The DivX code is based on the MPEG-4 video standard, a
successor to the technology that gave the world the popular MP3
audio format. Several companies, including Microsoft, have created
their own versions of MPEG-4 technologies.”