To say that divx codec is the only codec available right now would be saying stupid things. Of course there are other codecs present today and in this article, you are going to learn about some of them and we will try and explain what the main differences between these codecs and the divx codec are.
First of all, it is important to mention that there are different types of codecs that differ when it comes to the loss of quality that is involved during the compression and decompression of the files. Of course, the lossless codecs provide the better quality of the image and sound, but the compression that is achieved with these types of codecs is quite low. Namely, the reduction in the size of files is not that big and therefore, these types of codecs are usually not used for video files, but only for audio files. Codecs that fall into this group of codecs are FFv1, Lagarith, Huffyuv, YULS, while x264 also has a mode that is lossless.
Then, there is the group of codecs we are mostly interested in and these are the MPEG-4 ASP codecs, which include the divx codec, xvid codec, as well as some other such FFmpeg and 3ivx. These codecs are capable of encoding and decoding the majority of standard formats today, including the more and more popular H.264 format which has become the standard for HD video files. Among these, divx and xvid are the most popular both because they are very efficient and very easy to use, but also because they can run on machines that are not that high performance.
There are also Microsoft codecs, such s WMV and MS MPEG-4v3, which are proprietary video codecs of the Microsoft company and which are often required if you intend to play videos encoded in the windows formats. It should also be said that divx started as a hack of MS MPEG-4v3 codec.
There are also the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codecs and these entail x264 which is only an encoder, Nero Digital, QuickTime H.264 and also divx pro codec which has an H.264 decoding and encoding abilities added in the 7th version.