Xvid is not a video format but a codec, or say, a program for compressing to and decompressing from the MPEG-4 ASP format. Prior to cutting to the chase of Xvid codec free download, let's see the most easily confusing concepts of the video codec: Files encoded with global motion compensation, Qpel, MPEG quantization, multiple B-frames or files that exceed the VBV limitations may not play back properly on DivX Certified hardware devices. However, XviD can optionally encode video with advanced features that most DivX Certified set-top players do not support. XviD encoded files can be written to a CD or DVD and played in a DivX compatible DVD player. Now, open source guys didn't want to abandon the work of the Project Mayo and they continued to develop the codec further and the XviD was born. Eventually this closed source code was released as DivX 4 (since then, we've seen this closed source version to develop further and currently, the latest version of the codec is called DivX 6.0). After a while the codec matured, but the original developers wanted to push it further and started a company called DivX-Networks which started developing its own closed source version, based on the work of the Project Mayo. They launched an open source project, dubbed as Project Mayo (also known as Open-DivX) to develop this codec.

After its success, group of people, most notably the hacker behind the DivX codec, started developing a legal version of the codec which would be a real codec instead of basic hack of existing Microsoft codec. This version, best known as DivX v3.11 alpha (which was the last official version of the hacked codec), quickly became ridiculously popular among video freaks all over the world. Original DivX codec was not developed from the scratch, but was just a hacked version of Microsoft MPEG-4 Version 3 video codec. Like many other MPEG-4 formats, XviD can be played with certain MPEG-4 compatible, stand-alone DVD/DivX/XviD players.

XviD is an open-source compression codec based on MPEG-4 ISO format.

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