DivX

After the raging popularity

of MP3s and the threat it posed to the music industry, it’s now the turn

of the video industry to sit up in alarm. A new "hacker" video

encoding technology called DivX, which made its debut recently on some IRC

channels, is currently doing the rounds in the vast underbelly of the

Internet

At the outset, it must be

mentioned that though DivX shares its name with the now defunct technology

that allowed DVDs to be played in time-limited versions (and was touted to

replace video tapes one day), there is no connection between the two.

The encoding process begins

by copying a DVD movie to your hard disk by using a "hackers’

program"–DeCSS. DeCSS was originally released over the Web to enable

Linux users to play DVDs over their operating systems. The program came

under fire because it compromises the Content Scramble System of DVDs, which

was designed to protect DVDs against piracy.

After the movie’s been

copied to your hard disk using DeCSS, you can convert it to AVI format using

DivX encoding, and then distribute it over the Web. DivX uses MPEG 4 video

encoding along with MP3 audio encoding to encode a movie. This allows a high

degree of compression of both audio and video, without compromising on

quality. Most DivX movies can reach near-DVD level quality if encoded well,

at less than half the size. This brings down one barrier in pirating movies

over the Net–good quality can now be delivered in viable sizes.

Several Hollywood movie

titles and trailers are currently available for download. Since this is a

hacker-based system, the movies can’t be played over a conventional DVD/VCD

player. An add-on to Windows Media Player allows you to play DivX files.

Although DivX has the

potential to make it big just like MP3, its popularity is restricted to the

hacker community so far. One reason for this is that in spite of the highly

compressed format, the movies still take a long time to download, even up to

a whole day, thanks to low bandwidths, broken Net connections, etc.

Nevertheless, DivX is a way of distributing movies online, and may one day

pose a serious threat to the video film industry, or could open up newer

avenues for them.