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76 Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About DVD<br />
• The Divx central computer collected information about your viewing<br />
habits, as do cable/satellite pay-per-view services and large rental<br />
chains. According to Divx, the law did not allow them to use the information<br />
for resale and marketing.<br />
• Divx players included a mailbox for companies to send you unsolicited<br />
offers (spam).<br />
• Those who didn’t lock out their Divx player could receive unexpected<br />
bills when their kids or visitors played Divx discs.<br />
• Divx discs wouldn’t play in regular DVD players or on PCs with DVD-<br />
ROM drives. Some uninformed consumers bought Divx discs only to<br />
find they wouldn’t play in their non-Divx player.<br />
• Unlocked Silver discs would only work in players on the same<br />
account. Playback in a friend’s Divx player would incur a charge. (Gold<br />
discs, which were never released, would have played without charge<br />
in all Divx players.)<br />
• No market existed for used Divx discs.<br />
• Divx discs became unplayable after June 2001.<br />
• Divx players were never available outside the United States and<br />
Canada.<br />
The New DivX<br />
In March of 2000, a DVD redistribution technology called DivX;-) appeared.<br />
Yes, the smiley face was originally part of the name, which was a take-off on<br />
the original Divx format. The perpetrators should be drawn and quartered<br />
for the stupid joke, which caused untold confusion.<br />
DivX was originally a simple hack of Microsoft’s MPEG-4 video codec,<br />
combined with MP3 audio, allowing decrypted video from a DVD to be<br />
reencoded for downloading and playing in Windows Media Player. Work on<br />
DivX evolved through Project Mayo and a version originally called DivX<br />
Deux into an open-source initiative known as OpenDivX, based on the<br />
MPEG-4 standard. Out of all this came DivXNetworks, a company that<br />
turned DivX into an extensive video encoding and delivery system. An<br />
open-source variation is called 3ivx.<br />
How Can I Record from DVD to Videotape?<br />
Why in the world would you want to degrade a DVD’s beautiful digital picture<br />
by copying it to analog tape, especially because you lose the interactive<br />
menus and other nice features?
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