Mpeg 4 – The New DivX

I know what you’re thinking. DivX was that stupid ploy from Circuit City to try and get people to buy 'pay-per-view' DVD’s. Some bought in to it but not enough to keep the technology afloat. Thus, the term 'DivX' was eviscerated from everyone's vocabulary. The word picked up again about two years ago. It now refers to the new MPEG-4 compression techniques. As most of you know, MP3 files result in some pretty high quality tunes which can fit on your hard drive by the hundreds. It is marketed as "near CD-quality" music. Well, MPEG-4 is considered to be a "near DVD-quality" movie. In fact, they are created by literally “compressing a DVD” via a time-consuming process. The sound quality is pretty good; it doesn't support Dolby Digital or DTS but it is in stereo. The best part about DivX is that they are almost always under 700MB, so they fit perfectly on blank CD’s!

The files, themselves, don't have the extension ".mp4". They are AVI files that run under the proprietary-DivX "Playa" or Windows Media Player. The latter doesn't come standard with the ability to play DivX movies; the user needs to download the DivX "codec" from www.divx.com. A codec is more or less a "driver" that affixes itself to Windows Media Player and allows it to play the DivX movies. It’s a fantastic technology that, of course, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) hates, just as the record industry despises MP3.

The easiest way to acquire DivX movies is over the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs such as Morpheus, Kazaa, and Bearshare. However, unless you have a fast Internet connection, it will take quite a while to download a single movie. You also need a reasonably fast computer to play them back; I’d say at least a Pentium III-550 with 128 MB of RAM. My old 400 Mhz Celeron perpetually lost sync between the audio and video so most films were unwatchable.

More information about this emerging technology can be found at www.divx.com.