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What started as an underground tool used by many digital video hackers to pirate DVD video for Internet distribution is going legit, with a new company seeking to make it a mainstream player.
Project Mayo, formerly a collection of underground video experts who first created the popular DivX format based on the MPEG-4 video standard, has re-formed as a corporation. Dubbed DivXNetworks, the new company will seek to sell its technology and the DivX name-without the dubious reputation of its ancestor.
Part of that move includes the announcement that the Project Mayo site will become an open source DivX hosting site, giving developers access to the technology to spur its use.
DivX plans to license its technology as well as its brand, shopping both to anyone in the Internet digital video space wanting to improve their product quality, according to DivXNetworks cofounder Joe Bezdek.
"We're in talks with companies that are in all of those different markets that are interested in licensing the technology and in particular, the DivX brand," he says. "We're choosing out partners very carefully, and I can say that the partners we are talking to are large and very well-established businesses. These are not dot-com companies that are going to be out of business in a month."
Bezdek says with broadband access and PC power increasing, the time is right to do something about the quality of video on the Internet. With better compression quality and bit rates than earlier MPEG formats, DivX can change content viewing habits with full-motion, full-screen video at television quality or better.
"The conventional wisdom to date has been nobody wants to watch videos that you download over the Internet," he says. "The answer to that is current technology does not provide an experience viewers like, so no one watches movies that they download on the Internet."
Still, there will be challenges. One of the biggest will be to gain acceptance from the video content community, which first knew DivX as a video format that when coupled with a video ripping program such as DeCSS could convert protected DVD video into freely-available content that Internet users could trade. So it isn't surprising Bezdek is quick to stress his company wants to be part of the video industry, rather than take it apart.
"You need to separate the use and the technology itself," he says. "The technology itself is simply an excellent compression technology that takes this very good visual quality and compresses it down to a size that is reasonable to use on the Internet. That said, we are fully committed to compensating the copyright owners as much as they want to. We are incorporating the digital rights management technology into our offering, so that is very strong part of our technology and our message."
Bezdek also ruffles slightly at the idea DivX was the product of digital larceny. "For obvious reasons I don't care to characterize it as a pirate technology," he says. "I think it is important to note the technology that is available from us and our sister site, Project Mayo, we own the copyrights to that code. It's been written by us. It is the next generation of DivX that sort of betters in every significant way the previous generation of DivX."
In its underground days, DivX had gained popularity among early adopters-and that's one thing the company hopes to capitalize upon. "The technology has kind of been popularized by the users," he says. "We're not some massive company that has a huge marketing budget that is trying to push DivX down people's throats. The reason DivX is popular today is people love to use it-people love to watch movies that are encoded in DivX."
Ultimately, DivX backers not only want to join the Internet video mainstream, they also want to change it.
"We really feel like we are on the forefront of what's going to be a fundamental change in the way that people deal with digital video and watch digital video," Bezdek says.
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