DivX 6 Released with Enhanced Editing, Performance

DivX Networks has announced the launch of the DivX 6 video encoding format, the company’s latest rendition of MPEG-4, and the new DivX Media Format (DMF) which enables consumers to create sophisticated ‘DVD-like’ menu pages and chapter titles for DivX 6 videos.

Tom’s Hardware Guide - Technically, the quality and performance of DivX 6 video files is noticeably enhanced over editions rendered under previous versions. Demonstration DivX 6 videos provided to Tom’s Hardware Guide by DivX Networks show what this reporter’s vision recognizes as substantive improvements in rendering, especially with regard to minimizing visible artifacts and smoothing out diagonal borders and transitions. Historically, DivX 5 format videos were best shared over the Internet by first wrapping them in ZIP files for better compression. In my tests with the new DivX Encoder–a tool scheduled to replace the company’s Dr. DivX–I could re-encode DivX 5 files as DivX 6, with the resulting file size not much larger than the ZIP-compressed DivX 5 file. This implies a compression scheme that is just about as capable as the most aggressive Lempel-Ziv algorithms available.