DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc.), including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality. The DivX codec uses lossy MPEG-4 Part 2 compression, where quality is balanced against file size for utility.

It is one of several codecs commonly associated with "ripping", whereby audio and video multimedia are transferred to a hard disk and transcoded. The "DivX" brand is distinct from "DIVX" (Digital Video Express), an unrelated attempt by the now defunct U.S. retailer Circuit City to develop a video rental system requiring special discs and players. The winking emoticon in the early "DivX ;-)" codec name was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the failed DIVX system.

The DivX company then adopted the name of the popular DivX ;-) codec (which was not created by them), dropped the smiley and released DivX 4.0, which was actually the first DivX version (that is, DivX ;-) and DivX are two different things created by different people, the former is not an older version of the latter). The DivX name is its trademark. It is pronounced DIV-ex.

DivX ;-) (not DivX) 3.11 Alpha and later 3.xx versions refers to a hacked version of the Microsoft MPEG-4 Version 3 video codec (MPEG-4v3, Microsoft internal numbering scheme, unrelated to MPEG-4 parts) from Windows Media Tools 4 codecs. The video codec, which was actually not MPEG-4 compliant, was extracted around 1998 by French hacker Jerome Rota (also known as Gej) at Montpellier. The Microsoft codec originally required that the compressed output be put in an ASF file.

It was altered to allow other containers such as Audio Video Interleave (AVI). Rota hacked the Microsoft codec because newer versions of the Windows Media Player wouldn't play his video portfolio and résumé that were encoded with it. Instead of re-encoding his portfolio, Rota and German hacker Max Morice decided to reverse engineer the codec, which "took about a week".

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