DivX Codec Optimized to Create 3ivX

A new codec team, Happy Machines, plans to optimize the DivX codec to the fullest extent, resulting in lower file sizes, higher quality, and faster encoding. The developers of 3ivX plan to offer the codec to Windows, Macintosh, BeOS and *nix systems. Mr. Stux, one of the developers of DivX for Mac, is supervising the team's progress.

As said on their site, "We are currently concentrating on getting things done and working on all platforms. That means that our code is generic and fully NOT optimized. 3ivX is a temporal codec. That means it tries to find motion from one frame to another. It also means that it will be very efficient on movies that contain little difference from one frame to another, but will have a hard time with movies that have a lot of action."

The 3ivX team expects the new movies to be at most 40% to 60% of the current DivX size. The Matrix trailer, significantly larger in DivX format, will be around 7 mb large without sacrificing output quality.

The developers stress that optimization is currently their last priority. The main focus is to offer the codec to as many OSes as possible, and then aim their tasks towards optimizing the codec for each OS, depending on CPU usage, etc.

The new movie format should be released very soon. Check back for futher updates, or visit the 3ivX roadmap for release ideas.