DivX Inc. announced Thursday that its Web Player 1.0 — available for Mac OS X and Windows — has been downloaded more than a million times in the first week of its release. The free Web Player — available for download for either platform if you watch content from the DivX Movies Web page — enables you to watch DivX-encoded content direct from a Web page.
DivX — no relation to the failed optical disc format introduced in the mid-1990s — is a video encoding alternative to QuickTime that provides the ability to watch high-quality video while conserving bandwidth.
DivX introduced its version 6 codec to Mac users in December; it’s available for download from their Web site. Purchasers of Roxio’s Toast 7 Titanium CD and DVD burning software also received the software.
The DivX Web player plays back .avi and .divx files containing DivX video and MP3 audio. It supports progressive download and also allow Web page creators and bloggers to embedded DivX videos in their Web pages without having to use streaming servers or installing special server-side software, according to DivX. All that’s needed is the DivX creation software and some HTML tags — a webmaster Software Development Kit (SDK) is available for download.
Mac system requirements for the DivX player call for a 1GHz PowerPC processor or faster, 256MB RAM, Mac OS X v10.2 or later, and Safari 1.3, Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.7, Netscape 7.2 or Opera 8.51 and later. For HD playback, a 2.0GHz PowerPC and 512MB RAM are suggested. DivX has not yet been released as a Universal Binary for Intel-based Macs.