DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc., later purchased by Sonic Solutions and currently part of the Rovi Corporation formerly known as Macrovision), including the DivX Codec which became popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality.
There are two DivX codecs; the regular MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec and the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC DivX Plus HD codec. It is one of several codecs commonly associated with "ripping", whereby audio and video multimedia are transferred to a hard disk and transcoded.
Rovi Corporation has announced that the support for DivX 8.x for Windows, DivX 7.x for Mac, DivX Author and MPEG-2/DVD Plug-in finishes on December 28, 2012, albeit his DivX 9 software remains in development (beta stage).
Read more about DivX: History, Hardware Support, Competitors