DivX - Competitors

Competitors

The main competitors of DivX Inc. in the proprietary commercial software market are Microsoft corporation, Google Inc. and Apple Inc. Microsoft develops Windows Media Video codec (an implementation of VC-1 used on Blu-ray Discs) as well as Windows Media Player, a video player and Microsoft Expression Encoder, a video converter. Google Inc. develops WebM, a royalty-free video file format chiefly used for online video. Apple Inc. also develops QuickTime, a suite of software that can encode, decode and play digital video (including H.264–compliant video).

Additionally, all software products that create (encode) MPEG-4–compatible digital video also compete with DivX. One of these products that can produce MPEG-4–compliant digital video is Xvid, a free and open source codec that offers comparable quality. Both DivX Codec and Xvid are compliant with MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 ASP); however, the most commonly used DivX encoding profile (Home Theater) does not employ the same MPEG-4 ASP features enabled in the most commonly used Xvid encoding profile (home). In a series of subjective quality tests at Doom9.org between 2003 and 2005, the DivX encoder was beaten by the Xvid encoder every year. Similar tests were not undertaken for newer versions.

Another notable codec is libavcodec, a free software library that can create and play digital video formats that comply with MPEG-4 Part 2 and MPEG-4 Part 10. This library is also used by ffdshow, which can be used for playback with most Windows video players and video converters.