DivX

ca. 1998: gej hacked the ms mpeg-4 codec and labelled it divx;-) (aka divx3.11)

September 2000: Project Mayo, which includes "Gej" and other creators of the original DivX, announce that "DivX Deux", is already complete and being tested.

than gej and some others (starting divxnetworks) created "project mayo", an opensource mpeg-4 codec (aka divx4)

January 2001: DivXNetworks founded OpenDivX as part of Project Mayo which was intended to be a home for open source multimedia projects. OpenDivX was an open-source MPEG-4 video codec based on a stripped down version of the MoMuSys reference MPEG-4 encoder. The source code, however, was placed under a restrictive license and only members of the DivX Advanced Research Centre (DARC) had write access to the project CVS.

March 2001: DivX-encoded content ”” hard to find and difficult to download nine months ago ”” now appears all over the Net.

In early 2001, DARC member Sparky wrote an improved version of the encoding core called encore2. This was updated several times before, in April, it was removed from CVS without warning.

"after sparky comitted some great code (aka encore2) to the opensource cvs of project mayo to enhance divx4, divxnetworks decided to remove it from the publically available cvs again and create an own new closed source project based on it: divx5 was born"

"still some other guys (isibaar, gruel and suxendrol i think, not 100% sure), who loved the opensource idea, had the encore2 code, as it had been opensourced before, and decided to continue the opensource project with it: xvid was born"

Ressources:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=74070
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvid

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