--- Rieni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think Xvid is what it all started with, in France, > and that DivX is > the commercial version based on Xvid. Correct me if > I'm wrong.
The original DivX ;-) (the smiley was part of the original name) began soon after the collapse of Circuit City's 'throwaway' DVD rental service called Digital Video eXpress, or DivX for short. DivX ;-) was a hacked wrapper for a commercial MPEG4 codec. After some lawyer rattling from the owner of that codec, the DivX ;-) people dropped the ;-) from the name and produced a DivX that was all their own creation. That's what I remember of the history of the DivX codec. As for Circuit City's DivX, it was a scheme where special DVD players had built in decryption hardware to decode DVDs that were fairly strongly encrypted, much better than the pathetic CSS, and individually uniquely serial numbered. To play a DivX DVD after buying it from a Circuit City or other outlet, you placed it into the DivX player, which would dial up the central server and unlock the disc for 24 hours by temporarily storing a code in memory in the player. You also had the option to pay more and permanently unlock the disc, but *only for your player*. That was the "Silver" upgrade. A "Gold" upgrade option that would unlock the disc for use on any DivX player was planned but never implemented. When Circuit City shut DivX down, the central server had an option to command all DivX players calling it to set themselves to permanently unloack ALL DivX discs forever, but the #$^^#$#$&es didn't do it. Greedy to the bitter end. On some players it was possible to halt the internal clock and fix it so it could still call the server so that discs could be unlocked but would never time-out, even after the server was shut down. After the shutdown, all the discs unlocked on those players would still play. As far as I know, there has never been a hack to fix any DivX players to unlock all the discs. They will still play normal DVDs, but most of the players were rather cheap and basic units. ____________________________________________________________________________________ TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adobe-Premiere/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adobe-Premiere/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
