This is also where Circuit City comes into the picture. However, to use DIVX, you had to invest in a brand new type of DVD player that also supported the DIVX format. If only they had adopted standard DVD rentals instead.Īs shown in the demo, DIVX boasted a 48 hour rental period with no need to return the disc when the rental period ended.
The management team thought that this rental business would somehow take them to the next level. When they introduced DIVX, the assumed strategy was to add $4-5 rentals and boost DVD player sales in the Circuit City and Good Guys stores. While Circuit City was a reasonable electronics retailer, they didn’t have any presence in the video rental market. In fact, it might even be considered that failure of the DIVX format ushered in the downward slide of Circuit City into oblivion. They also dropped into a rabbit hole with this DIVX venture that took them away from their core retail business and caused them to spend millions to create and support a format that didn’t live up to the hype. Unfortunately, Circuit City’s management goals were way too ambitious and overconfident. Don’t feel obligated to watch the whole thing. Here’s the Circuit City DIVX promo video (skip to 0:17 to begin an unrealistic family scenario, press 1 to skip the intro entirely or jump to 4:19 to begin use case demonstration). As a side note, Circuit City was also the second largest appliance retailer behind Sears at that time. However, Circuit City sought to disrupt that by trying to create a new standard that not only simultaneously upset Blockbuster’s cart, but introduced a new format that would bring more recognition to the Circuit City brand (and, of course, generate more hardware and rental sales). Meaning that by 1998, Blockbuster had the rental market sewn up. The Circuit City management was obviously willing to do anything to become the number one electronics retailer, including dreaming up technology ideas that didn’t need to be built. At the time, Circuit City was considered the second largest electronics retailer behind Best Buy. The primary impetus to build the new DIVX rental standard by Circuit City was probably brand recognition. Hopefully, this clears up any confusion around this convoluted naming. So then, what does DivX -) have to do with the DIVX DVD format? Not much other than DivX -) making a tongue-in-cheek poke at Circuit City’s DIVX rental format. The video codec, which was actually not MPEG-4 compliant, was extracted around 1998 by French hacker Jerome Rota (also known as Gej) at Montpellier.
DIVX FORMAT THATVWILL PLAY ON DIVX DVD PLAYER WINDOWS
Here’s what the DivX Wikipedia article says of the early days of the video encoder named DivX -).ĭivX -) (not DivX) 3.11 Alpha and later 3.xx versions refers to a hacked version of the Microsoft MPEG-4 Version 3 video codec (not to be confused with MPEG-4 Part 3) from Windows Media Tools 4 codecs.
This smiley was actually a nod (and sarcasm) towards Circuit City’s then soon-to-be-defunct DIVX rental standard. Yes, this encoder name included the winking smiley. In fact, the original name of the DivX encoder was actually DivX -) Even though there is no relationship by Circuit City to the DivX encoder, there is a slight reverse relationship from the DivX encoder to the DIVX brand. The DIVX brand name, introduced by Circuit City, bears no relationship to the DivX or Xvid video encoding standards. However, it’s not entirely clear what problem Circuit City was trying to solve by introducing the DIVX rental format when DVD was already useful enough for rentals. To get this confusion cleared up quickly, DIVX was a brand name assigned to a new DVD rental standard introduced by Circuit City and the entertainment law firm Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca and Fischer in 1998. What they didn’t tell you was that you would need to buy a brand new expensive DVD player to play them. It purported to be a DVD rental format that had no late fees and the media didn’t need to be returned… at least those were the benefits purported to the consumer. In 1998 (almost 20 years ago), a new DVD rental format arrived named DIVX (aka Digital Video Express).
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