You know what they say... Piracy Is No Party

How did they come up with that idea

Its almost like the Wold Economic Forum designed this… sort of a precursor to “you will own nothing and be happy”.

It failed because it was in search of a solution for a problem that didn’t exist. Consumers generally prefer to rent movies versus owning, but why would I run up to circuit city and put up with mall traffic to get a movie when I could just rent an actual dvd from blockbuster 5 minutes up the road? If I have to call someone on the phone or connect to an outside server to rent something then I’d just rent a movie with PPV thru the cable box at the time.

How were you able to play it? You kinda glossed over it.

It confused the hell out of me that somebody made a hardware divx player.

@@GamesFromSpace You guys are confusing two different things. The videos that you could download in the early-to-mid 2000s were made with an MPEG4 codec called "DivX", whose creators jokingly named it after this failed DIVX format.

@@Dee_Just_Dee thanks for clearing up my confusion about DivX surviving past this Circuit City failed format.

And then fanmade dvd covers would have "DIVX" in the style of the DVD logo because they were for burning a bunch of video files like an anime season. And then they came up with another codec named XviD.

@@Dee_Just_Dee You're confused about our confusion.

Did they make you watch that industrial sales video on how to sell them? T (Technology) Q (Quality) C (Convenience). I would have been at those meetings after they flopped mocking the crap out of them, like TQC TQC baby! Check out my new DIVX tattoo! Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, normal DVDs have got to go! Seriously, they must have been so blinded the dollar signs in their eyes that they never stopped to think if it was a good idea or not. Big props to you for not selling out.

@@natewheatshelf Yes I did see all of those inhouse DIVX promotions. They helped me in not selling a DIVX player. My father was a TV repair man, so I grew up with a basis for good and bad technologies. A friend of his was moonlighting as a DJ at a local radio station. We would visit the station from time to time and intead of being in the broadcast booth, I would chat with the engineer about how the signal was modulated against an FM broadcast, things like that. So when I first learned about DIVX, I was not impressed at all. My first thought was this is not a good idea. It's destined to fail, and I want to distance myself from this whole concept.

At least they could play regular dvds

Same here I worked at the one in Merced California and ohhh man if I even saw customers go close to to the divx area (which was pretty rare LOL) I would just walk the other way towards the TV section

Management wanted employees to buy a Divx player? I could only imagine what the other family members who lived in said employees house thought when they learned that said employee had to buy a Divx player and had to hook it up to phone lines in addition to the TV.

I'm glad that you and many others saw it for what it is. If this format was successful main stream, then no one would own their own copy of the movies they purchased from that point onward. This strategy that they had only makes sense with online services, not with physical products. Thank you for making sure that they failed by not buying or supporting this crap 👍

​@@ThexthSurvivorso like now with streaming services and no hard copies available.

This was pretty much the general reaction of most people who took the time to read the sales info. Some people ran rather than walked away form the DIVX displays. I was in a BestBuy store where one of the sales people was talking to their manager about the DIVX gimmick and the manager, right on the sales floor, said (and I quote) "That's the dumbest f**king thing I ever heard!" Best Buy knew it was garbage too.

@@asherdie Yes, as for hard copies now, DVDs and VHS tapes are super cheap for the most part. Bluray if you're looking in the right places you can find cheap also. For new movies and TV shows with no physical copy, I just make my own.

@@ThexthSurvivor 100% agree. I also stopped buying physical boxes of games when they started with that game is not there as whole and you have to install it thru "some" steam. So it's pointless to buy boxed version when you can't install it anyway without some online service.

It also made me question who wouldn't steal a car, if the stealing was actually copying and now everyone had a free new car.

Aha I see, I never knew of this physical format but of course I'm aware of the codec.

Though its interesting, philips eventually started putting out dvd players that supported the codec divx, so as a kid I would download my movies, burn them to a data dvd and have my downloaded stuff on my tv that way, I think this was around 2007. but it was a cool player and I used the heck out of it until I moved to a modded original xbox with XBMC.

u prefers XviD

@@kojimayoshiyuki2728 Oh cool, I’ve literally never come across anyone else, online or irl, who also did this. I specifically hunted down one of these DVD players for the sole purpose of watching .avi files on my TV.

Exactly! Even though we pay for a movie to "own" on streaming, the studio can edit it or remove it at any time without even compensating us. Often they lose the licensing rights or something to keep streaming it. I don't know all the details why but have heard this is an issue. Edit: when we purchase a movie on a streaming platform, it's basically a long-term/indefinite rental. Also, if the streaming site shuts down, the movie is gone, too.

That's because the public wants it now. If people really didn't want this they wouldn't support it and these companies would be forced to abandon the idea. The problem is that people aren't willing to sacrifice their entertainment to take a stand against this sort of thing. It has now gone past entertainment and is beginning to infect other things, with automobile manufacturers offering subscription based features in their vehicles.

You have to remember that a DIVX probably cost about $1 more than a rental in many cases, but was likely $10 or more less than buying. $10 in the early 2000's was probably enough to get three people a meal at Wendy's, so the equivalent of $25-$30 today. It wasn't a horrible idea, but it just wasn't going to appeal to enough people at a time when even DVD was new tech and Netflix would send you up to 4 discs at a time by mail for $12 a month or so.

@@kcgunesq It was a horrible idea, it's basically selling people an otherwise useless plastic disc and then demanding they rent out the contents each time they want to watch it.

@@WeirdWonderful it had potential for its time. I have many movies that I've only watched once or twice. I liked these movies and will probably watch it again one day so I keep them. If it was cheaper at the time (maybe $1-$2 to rent rather than more expensive than Blockbuster) when DVDs cost $22-$25 to own, and you couldn't find them used, it could have worked. Yes, you have to pay for it every time you want to watch, but big picture you're paying less overall. For the movies you watch all the time you could just get DVD. The problem was that the prices of DVDs came down and $5 wasn't a deal to rent a movie. The only real benefit was that if you didn't get time to watch it you could just get to it later.

@@WeirdWonderful Let's not forget that people these days don't count ownership to mean much.

​​​@@WeirdWonderfulit wasn't a great idea, but essentially that's how most people purchase movies today, minus the useless disc It was the early years of the internet, heck it was the early days of disks themselves, I could see why they were interested in doing this, sort of a way to compete with the movie rental joints, but yea it was too confusing and not convenient enough to ever work.

Precisely. Their plan was to have consumers pay recurring rentals and making more profit long term. So you never really own it, you're just renting it.

@@ThexthSurvivor So you "owned" the disc & every time you played it you had to pay?? Sounds nuts to me.

@@deanovolplo7469 Consumers would have to be nuts to support that kind of business model. I'm glad it failed. Older media is super cheap now for anyone that wants to buy.

⁠@@deanovolplo7469 As crazy as it sounds though is I bet if you did a survey of people who bought DVDs over the last 20 years a lot probably only watched the movie once or twice at most, so three divx replays at $4.50 each would have still been more cost effective than buying the movie for $20-$30 new.

If you really think about it streaming is a version of this…

So basically the same difference 😅

@@RKingis LOL

They probably did it on purpose. Brought in a ringer to run it into collapse, then hired him as a consultant at the parent company. Google Dave Brandon.

Not at all it was just on of the bad decisions. Divx was not the reason for bankruptcy and ended 8 years before bankruptcy ​@@RKingis

I remember when they fired 3400 of its highest paid store employees because they were making too much money, and then let them apply for lower paid positions in order to keep their jobs. Who is going to support a store like that!?

You're right, but they were counting on people not being savy enough to know that they wanted to trap and milk the consumers continuously. Effectively creating a low effort, passive income model with massive profits into the foreseeable future. Corporate greed knows no bounds. I am very happy that most people were smart enough not to support this BS, because if they did, every physical copy of any movie, TV show, and music to this day would have the same or worse endless rental trap. We would never own it for personal use!

you could buy more time for like 3$. why the need for a phone line.

@@gogereaver349 To pay the server $3 for that extra play.

It was basically a rental. The modern version is streaming rentals that give you 24 hrs to watch. That they thought people would buy them used at yard sales seems ridiculous lol.

@@ThexthSurvivor You mean like with streaming and digital rentals today?

thats not what divx was. you are thinking flexplay.

@@gogereaver349 I guess I wasn't clear. I said the dye one was worse than divx. Just forgot what its name was.

​@Monty22001 They were both equally terrible ideas. Also both brought out around 2000 when Home Satellite TV was become much more mainstream and affordable, and along with that you could just order the movie network - or pay-per-view films. This was also when they started bringing out recording receivers as well so you could just record whatever you were watching. The only thing I'd give DIVX over Flexplay, was they tried it in '98/'99 - back when then conventional video store was a still a very real thing. So although DIVX was terrible in practice - on paper I could see it making sense. Flexplay ran from '03, until whenever it died it's miserable death.. around 2010 I think. The complete nonsensical thinking behind Flexplay was when the launched it - Blockbuster was already starting to trend down, and Netflix was gaining steam. Every year throughout the 2000's old Blocky was tumbling and Netflix was getting bigger and bigger. So the writing was on the wall regarding physical media and how things were going to go... but even then Flexplay kept pushing. Must've been funded by a bunch of Dinosaurs that refused to accept change.

No one at the time thought DIVX would destroy physical media. 🙄🙄 DIVX was physical media. At that time, physical media is all there was. What would it have been destroyed in favor of? High quality video streaming was decades away.

@@tgs1766Ok, is saying it would just destroy optical media and people would go back to tape be a better explanation?

Yes, but also with that, I remember owning a double sided laserdisc player (Pioneer CLD-3070... loved that thing)... and all those movies were sold on laserdisc. I had to buy Face/Off on laserdisc (which I would've done anyway then) and I also bought Star Trek 1-6 on it too). Pioneer and Fox still made laserdiscs during this period.

@@LaurenGlenn Yes, they did but but for much longer. And LaserDiscs were always niche. They never gained mainstream acceptance in the US. They were too costly and too cumbersome.

And having a new format that you bought only to see it fail, and to see movie studios give up on your format of choice that you adopted early is "a celebratory moment" because... 🤷‍♂️ My only theory is that you somehow thought "celebratory" had negative connotations. If not, then why the heck would it be a "celebratory moment" for early adopters of DIVX?

​@@awesomeferret looks like reading comprehension is not a strength of yours?

@@uhoh7541 oh the irony... It's about the order of the statements. I'm guessing the OP was saying that the early adopters of DVD were having a celebratory moment due to contextual cues, but due to the placement of the sentence, grammatically, one would assume that he was talking about early adopters of Divx were having a celebratory moment. And obviously the early adopters of Divx wouldn't be celebrating about major movie studios dropping the format they adopted early. It's pretty funny that you made a jab about reading comprehension when you so conspicuously ignored my major points in my comment. 😂

no one touches my electronics either 😤 well….I just saw your profile, I might let you touch them 😕

Sounds like your dad is/was a technophile.

I bought a playstation 2 in 2000, it played dvds out of the box, which was pretty awesome. I stopped using VHS at that point, until recently, when I bought a VCR for the nostalgia.

I run my house much like your father. My bluray collection is holy and may never be touched by inpure hands. Only mine

Material things 🙄

Yeah just not having to return something was at least not a big increase in convenience.

Disc rot is right. At one time I owned about 400 DVD's. If I had known over one third of them would end up being unplayable, I would have never bothered with them in the first place. I have only about 150 now, and I tried to play my "From Russia With Love" DVD the other day and it skipped chapters at will, froze up, and I threw it away. I regret all of these formats. A friend gave me a Blu-Ray player a few years ago and some of the discs don't even allow you to resume play at will.

It was even worse where I lived. New releases tended to be 3 dollars to rent and you could go on special nights at some video stores and do bundles where you rented X amount of movies and it was just 1 or 2 dollars each so "buying" a movie on Divx was actually a LOT more expensive than renting in our market. Making the deal even worse was the fact that DVDs often had extra content on the disc other than just the movie and most Divx discs didn't so you paid more money to get less content AND the player had to be hooked up to a phone line AND the players cost more money. There was absolutely no benefit to the consumer in our market and many others.

What causes disc rot? I've personally never seen it and some of the CDs i have from the early/mid 90's weren't even stored properly over the years (loose with imperfect climate control). Never seen it on a DVD either, BUT i only go back to that format for a few titles only available on it. I hear it discussed often, is it possible a certain climate is more prone to it or maybe there was a manufacturer selling bad discs to only certain parts of the states?

You're right, but some people are unfortunately.

@@ThexthSurvivor oh. I’m dumb. But still

They basically were assuming everyone was retarded.

I had the non-DIVX Panasonic player (I believe the model no. was DVD A-310 or A350). It was a cool little player with a built-in Dolby Digital decoder - so 5.1 analogue outputs on the player and no eternal decoder needed. Plugged straight into my receiver (which had an analogue 5.1 input).

I had that same RCA player that I got at RadioShack. It was simple, but worked well. I only ditched it when I upgraded to a Blue Ray player.

This is funny😂😂😂

Nope, it was greed that killed it.

I don't know of anyone who thought this sounded great on paper. Imagine buying something and then not owning it outright? Yeah, really exciting stuff. :)

Almost as exciting as paying for a dvd from a store which you needed to drive back to the next day and return it ;) @@LaurenGlenn

Sounds great on paper if you can't read maybe....

I think people didn't really mind just renting a movie to watch it quickly or having to return it until around 2005 and then increasingly with each year. Blockbuster touting "end of late fees" probably just made them more unpopular.

It wasn’t just CC. Studios were in on this too. Not that the bosses there would have been any different.

I've never had a boss with any ideas 🤔

I have the same question

My understanding is that the phone verification service was shut off in 2001, so I'm curious as well.

Agreed. I really want to know, not because I want to recreate it but just pure curiosity. I’m thinking the “registration disc” either has a copy of every known decryption key for every released film or some master key. Either way, that seems like a massive oversight that the memory location of the decryption key can be accessed via disc instead of solely the phone line.

I had one of these in 1999. I was aware of people that had slowed the internal clock on the player so the initial two day period would last much longer. I never looked into actually doing it. I did try to rip some of the discs I had a few years later with no luck.

Every word of this is false. Either that or you just didn’t understand what was going on at the time.

I remember that!

Most of the DVD players you see with DivX on them have the codec logo because they can decode data files in that format. So instead of burning a "traditional" DVD you could burn a DL-DVD with a bunch of AVI files instead. Much like when CD players started being able to read/play data CDs with a bunch of MP3 files on them instead of being burned like a traditional 74min CD with 9-14 tracks.

They failed because of corporate greed. They wanted you and everyone who purchased movies or TV shows to only be able to rent them continuously and never actually owning them for personal use. If people were stupid enough to buy into that nonsense, they would have made tons of passive income into the foreseeable future with very little effort. Thankfully, people were smarter than that. There have been various types of technology in the past that I wished didn't fail because they were good ideas, but this DivX endless rental trap is one form of technology that I am glad failed.

It was a horribly retarded idea, that anyone with a half a brain could see it was doomed.

@@ThexthSurvivorIt wasn’t just CC. Major studios were in on this too. For the year that DIVX was in existence, 20th Century Fox and Paramount movies were only on DIVX. They refused to support standard DVD. Once DIVX died, they relented.

To add to that, poor customer service and bad treatment of employees. Divx was a terrible idea and resulted in a huge loss for CC, but it hardly contributed to its downfall. CC was making a ton of bad decisions towards the end of its life. Divx happened to be just one.

The video format is actually different than the discs. Initially, DivX videos online were branded as "DivX ;-)" as the people who created the codec yoinked the name from the DIVX company, as their trademark was not applicable in France. When DIVX went under, the company registered the trademark for themselves and dropped the wink emoticon.

yea but it's not exactly the same... with DIVX you own a physical copy that physically takes up space on your shelf but can't play it without paying more money. I think that is even worse than the digital only system we have now!

Anyone could have told you Blu ray was winning that race back in the day. Hddvd never stood a chance

@@lokionthecomeup he probably bought a Zune also😂

​@cam2168 Zune sound better than iPod and gave you more space for less money

@@camcruise9600 I bought one too. It was great.

HD-DVD was a superior format. Blu-ray (Sony) only won the war by paying Fox to be dedicated. It doesn't really matter though since it was all a short term step. Even Toshiba was looking at doing flash cards when the war was raging since the costs got so low.

True, but when it comes to streaming services you just pay one price for the entire content library. With DIVX, you had to pay to watch each time PER DISC. Can you imagine how expensive that would have been?

@@christiangonzales7429 like pay per view, or game discs where you need to connect to validate the license on disc

I don't remember any studios that went exclusively with Divx. Divx operated from June 1998 to June 1999. Paramount began releasing DVDs Oct 1998.

That's probably a good thing back then.😊

If you didn’t have a Circuit City in your area you wouldn’t have. And even if you did, you still likely wouldn’t have. It only lasted one year.

It must have also been fun tearing down the DIVX displays!

@@christiangonzales7429pretty sure warehouse team took them down overnight so it was an uneventful teardown. The training videos for this were pretty hilarious though, they really thought this was going to be the next big thing (as employees we knew better)

Your talking about Flexplay. I bought a bunch for $1 on clearance and then ripped them. Was that pirating or not? 🤣

And for some reason people consider this concept to be acceptable.

@@darkprinc979 Yeah I’ve been buying physical media because these corporate streamers can go suck a bag of d****s for taking our money to “own” a digital copy, only to take it away without so much as an explanation or an apology. Hard no.

Major studios signed on for this and were part investors. During the one year that the DIVX format existed, 20th Century Fox and Paramount movies were only on DIVX. They would not support standard DVD. Once DIVX died, they had to relent and started releasing their catalogs on DVD.

It was the heyday of P2P filesharing and torrenting. Piracy was much more popular back then when millennials were young and poor. The studios were losing millions. They were desperate and tried this stupid idea.

The only difference between a regular DVD and a DIVX DVD was the DRM. Otherwise they were both the same electronically. There was no difference between the DIVX version of a film and the regular DVD format outside of the DRM.

@@cubdukat Maybe in general. The version comparison of Pulp Fiction shown on this video the aspect ratios are different and the DivX version is cropped while the DVD version is widescreen, not cropped and has the correct aspect ratio. Thus making the DVD version better.

@@ThexthSurvivor however encoded the divx version was lazy.

At least Netflix wasn't retarded with greed.

Exactly. Who in the world would want to pay every time they wanted to watch one of their DVDs. Made ZERO sense!

Also they screwed over their staff by cutting commission and leakage ie staff theft went through the roof.

Not the same thing as what he’s talking about in this video

@@tgs1766 of course I know that. It is the same codec though

Actually it wasn't long before they built anti piracy into VCRs, and it was fairly hard to strip. The scheme was pretty neat: Encrypt the speed modulation signal so that the TV didn't even know what was going on, but another VCR would choke on it and you'd get the annoying speed jerks on the copied disk.

@@nixon2tube When did they start putting the anti piracy stuff on pre recorded VHS tapes? My dad bootlegged VHS tapes until the early 2000s, and I never noticed him having any problems making copies. I was young and didn’t really pay attention to what he was doing, maybe he knew how to get around it haha

I remember that web cite too, I got a few movies from there, I still have the free version of divx on my PC but i hardly ever use it as vlc will play almost anything, i guess i keep divx as nostalgia...

@@phoenixman8569 nosralgia or not it was a bright idea of the technology ,small files that play HD videos, I hope if they use it in the future, and these guys get credit and recognition 👍

Same. Online movie sites with Divx players almost always had the best quality you could find.

You're referring to the DivX codec that was use for compressing video files for use on PCs. Much better than the crap Circuit city wanted the masses to support.

because divx was a good codec but it did have drm ability. it lived on as xvid. basically open sourced without the drm. how did you think they got 4.99 disk it was just essently a mpeg4 vcd.

Hi, I do realise that it had DRM in it but in the UK we did not have to bother with stuff like that. We could put a lot of DIVX videos on a DVD-R and just watch them.@@gogereaver349

Nope, you have that backwards. The DIVX disc format he's talking about in this video is the original DIVX. The PC format DivX was developed by somebody else entirely, who chose the name to poke fun.

@@gogereaver349 Not the same format. The *DIVX* format CRTTV is talking about uses MPEG2 just like ordinary DVDs, except that instead of using a decryption key stored on the disc itself, it needs to "phone home" so that the user can be charged per view. The *DivX* codec came along after DIVX's failure, and its devs chose the name "DivX" to poke fun at DIVX.

That’s from the DivX codec. This is a DIVX DVD he’s talking about. The two have nothing to do with each other.

@@tgs1766 same logo. Do you mind explaining more?

@@hectormanuel8360 A group of developers that wanted to create an MP4 codec that made it easy for pirates to share videos that would be compatible with Windows Media Player named it DivX in order to mock the original DIVX format. The whole point was that the original DIVX format was filled with DRM while the developers at DivX were making software that made it easy for pirates to share movies and TV shows.

@@hectormanuel8360 I can. The official name of DIVX is DIVX. The official name of DivX is / was DivX :). Note the smiley face. That isn't me throwing an emoticon at you. That was actually the name of the codec, and they were pretty aggressive on insisting that the smiley was included in the name of the codec. But what IS the difference between the two? DIVX had encrypted data on the disc that you'd get from Circuit City. The DIVX player would need to "phone home" in order to authorize a playback of the disk. The player was essentially playing the game "Mother, May I?" with a central server that had to authorize the player and the media. That is a VERY simple explanation of how this worked, but I hope you get the idea. DivX :) on the other hand was simply a codec that any person could encode a video / audio file to. It had a VERY high compression rate, and most movies under 2 hours long could be "burned" to a 650 megabyte CD-ROM. When this codec hit the scene, the devs made it VERY clear that they had no affiliation with the DIVX format or the people who ran it, and they sort of thought it was funny to name their software after that ridiculous media format (DIVX). When DivX :) was in its early stages, it wasn't a problem. People like me who followed this sort of thing sort of "got" the joke. However, after a few years (perhaps even less), some DVD players advertised that they could play XviD and DivX :) formats in their players... this was the CODEC, not the DIVX media. So if you had some old DIVX disk laying around, these players couldn't play them. The DivX :) team started licensing out the codec to various companies that made DVD players. If you ever find yourself at a thrift store or a garage sale, you can still find these players with the DivX logo on it. They won't play DIVX disks, though. I hope that makes things a little clearer. Both DivX :) and DIVX have their own Wikipedia articles, so if you want an explanation that is a little more thorough, that might be a place to start. Happy new year--

@@hectormanuel8360 They are not related. It is like George Bush and George Washington. They are not the same person. You can see the difference between DivX and DIVX? Unless you were following these things 25 years ago you likely have not heard of DIVX.

Yes you could you would buy another 48 hrs for however much it was

And if you chose not to all you had were worthless, useless, plastic discs.