What is DivX? How to compress Video files

Software tips -> What is DivX? How to compress Video files

MP3 format has revolutionized the audio industry. MP3 was able to produce the same quality of audio as in the audio CDs. However the size of MP3 files were just one tenth of the actual audio file size. That is the reason why MP3 is very popular and many download MP3 songs from the internet. With MP3, the size of the audio can be reduced to one tenth of the original size without compromising the quality. Many wondered, If only video can be compressed without compromising the quality, how wonderful it would be. DivX is the answer for video lovers. Why should video be compressed? AVI is the most popular video format. A 3 hours movie with the clarity of 640x480 size, if saved in AVI format will occupy 20GB to 30GB. The reason is that AVI is a non compressed video format. If just one movie requires 30GB then imagine how many video files you can store in your hard disk. That is why video needs to be compressed. Motion Picture Group released MPEG1 format which is a compressed video format. MPEG1 even after compression gave the same quality as the VCR format. Motion Picture Expert Group then released the MPEG2 format which was even more advanced. With MPEG2, the same 3 hours movie can be compressed to 1.8GB. The latest release from Motion Picture Expert Group is the MPEG4 format. Using MPEG4 the same 3 hours movie can be compressed to a mere 650MB. Which makes it possible to store the movie in a single CD. What is DivX? DivX is also a video compression format. DivX compresses the video using MPEG4 format and compresses the audio using MP3 format. Therefore both audio and video is compressed in the 10:1 ratio. Therefore a file which is initially stored in a DVD can be now stored in a single VCD. How to play DivX files? You need to have a DivX player software to play a DivX format file. You can download this free DivX player from www.divx.com . To play DivX files you need a computer with atleast Pentium II 300 MHz, 128 MB RAM and 4MB video. Where to download DivX files? DivX movies are available at many websites. Most of them are illegal ones. Therefore do not just download anything that is available and get into legal issues. You will not have any problems if you download those files that are declared as free or 'No copy rights'. If you have video files in VCDs then you can convert them to DivX format using the software 'Virtual Dub'. You can convert your DVDs to DivX format using software such as Smartripper, Virtual Dub, XvidBit Calculator and Xvid Codec. What software you need? To convert AVI to DivX, MPEG to DivX, VCD to DivX or DVD to DivX you can use the following software. Virtual Dub. You can download Virtual Dub at www.virtualdub.org and use Virtual Dub to convert video from one format to another format. DivX Codec. You can download Divx Codec from www.divx.com To convert audio to MP3 format you need MP3 encoder. Win LAME or Lame MP3 encoder software are used to convert to MP3 audio files. You can download Lame MP3 encoder from http://miti.ok.free.fr You can calculate Bitrate using xvidBit Calculator, Dvt001. You can download Dvt001 software from www.musclesoft.de