DivX is the mother of all video codecs and a manna from heaven for all. DivX, touted to be the MP3 of video world, is a video encoding technology by which very high compression can be achieved without any significant loss of quality. It is the brand name of a patent pending video compression technology developed by DivXNetworks Inc. USA. DivxNetworks got a hell lot of help from the open source community and the open source version also called OpenDivX can be found at Project Mayo.

The DivX codec is based on the MPEG-4 compression standard and is so wonderfully powerful that it can compress DVD standard video to almost 10 percent without any loss of visual quality. What it means is that very soon we can download high-quality full-screen video from the Internet using our bandwidth-plagued pipes. To install DivX, you can download a DivX bundle from their website, which includes the codec to play DivX files or encode them. It also includes the default DivX player – a nice and intuitive player meant specifically for DivX files. But you do not really need it to play DivX movies: once the codec is installed even windows media player can play them. A word of caution though – do not try playing your DivX CDs on standalone VCD or DVD players that do not play DivX.

So what do we need to convert your existing VCDs and/or DVDs into DivX?

1. The DivX codec: download the latest one from www.divx.com or take a look in the “must have” section of bundled CD in most computer magazines these days.
   
   
2. An app called Virtualdub: download a copy for free from www.virtualdub.org
   
   
3. Your standard PC CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive.