DivX Networks is today announcing the launch of DivX 6! This new version of the video encoding format compasses the company's latest version of MPEG-4, in addition to the DivX Media Format (DMF), a wrapper around DivX 6 videos to create the kind of effects used in DVD menus pages and so forth. You can download DivX 6 here.
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.
DivX Media Format (DMF) holds the key to DivX files containing multiple-language subtitle sets, alternate audio tracks, file tags similar to EXIF tags for digital still images and much much more! With hardware manufacturers now set to embrace the format as well, the future of DivX looks pretty bright.