San Diego (CA)

- On Tuesday, DivX released their latest codec, version 6.8. DivX remains free, with a $19.99 DivX Pro available. DivX is a video codec (coder/decoder). It uses complex mathematical relationships found in image data to compress the video content of the source. Display devices require uncompressed video. A 1920 x 1440 x 32-bit color at 85 Hz will require about 940 MB of data per second to be transmitted to it. With overhead latency, that’s a nearly saturated 10 Gbps ethernet stream of data. If a 2 hour movie were to be stored in an uncompressed format at that resolution, it would take 6,850 GB of storage.

Video compression saves space With video compression, the same movie can be stored in a fraction of that space. This is how movies today are encoded on DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray. However, those movies still contain a lot of extra video information to make them as high quality as possible. For many uses, there is no need for such high quality storage. As such, software codecs like DivX can be used to take their large file sizes and compress them down even further, while still maintaining an "adequate’ visual sequence.

Sacrifice quality for space Digital artifacts become more visible, and during high motion sequences it becomes very square-boxy and pixelated. Still, for the most part, a modern video codec, like DivX, h.264, Xvid, etc., will allow for a relatively smooth video sequence, one which can fit easily onto a CD, instead of a DVD. This also allows many such movies to be stored locally on a hard drive, rather than having to pull out the source disc each time they are to be viewed.

From the DivX website:

Welcome to DivX Codec 6.8!

Additionally we have added the option to utilize custom quantization matrices into our encoder. This will allow you die-hard perfectionists to fine tune the encoder for specific content types such as anime or CGI.