DivX: From Underground to Living Room

The din over free speech--and code distribution--online in the recent DVD decryption case has largely drowned out notice of the core technology, which offers interesting potential for digital television.

DivX is the technology that is the linchpin in the Motion Picture Association of America's successful prosecution of DVD decryption software called De-Content Scrambling System (DeCSS). In August, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled in favor of the MPAA and banned DeCSS. Depending on whom you believe, DeCSS is used to view DVDs on Linux computers or to circumvent the encryption technology encoded into every DVD.

If DivX sounds familiar, it should. But this DivX isn't the failed pay-per-use DVD format that Circuit City stores tried to foist on consumers a few years ago. Rather, this program can compress typically huge video files into sizes more easily viewed over the Internet.

DeCSS hasn't disappeared, though, and neither has DivX. It has found a wide audience in the computer underground, where pirated movies, CDs, and video games are traded like business cards at a trade show.

DivX will be the video equivalent of MP3, according to Jordan Greenhall, the chief executive officer of Project Mayo, a new company banking on DivX. The technology, he says, is already spreading faster than MP3 did at the same early stages of its life. DivX already has between 3 and 10 million users, Greenhall says; that number also claimed by Napster.

Ideal for Pirating

The role of DivX came early in the trial in testimony by Michael Shamos, an intellectual property attorney and faculty member of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Using Windows 2000, DeCSS, a file compression utility called WinZip, DivX, and Internet Relay Chat, Shamos showed how to pirate DVDs, affirming the MPAA's claim that DeCSS facilitates theft. After a 6-hour download, Shamos produced a pirated copy of The Matrix, although he admitted the quality was not as good as DVD. Although 6 hours is a long wait, Shamos noted that download time should quickly fall as bandwidth and computer processor speeds increase.

In the Internet's hacker underground, DivX is widespread. In fact, Mayo's Greenhall says, hackers consider it "poor form, poor style" to use anything other than DivX for online movies. DivX generates excitement and loyalty due to the degree of compression it offers. It is ideal for pirating DVDs because it can perform the Herculean task of compressing a DVD, which can hold up to 4GB of data, into 650MB, a size small enough to fit onto a CD-ROM and sustain only minimal quality loss.

But Greenhall and the rest of Project Mayo have aspirations that reach far beyond the nearest modem. They want your television. And they may well get it, thanks to a coincidence of birth.