DIVX DVD - The Format that Bankrupted Circuit City
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2024
- Divx DVD - The Format that Bankrupted Circuit City - Today I stumbled upon a very nice Panasonic DVD Player, the Panasonic X410U DIVX DVD CD Player. But when I went to play a DIVX DVD, I couldn't even get past a registration screen? Why not? I own the Hardware, why cannot I not play these movies?
#DIVX #DVD #Review
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Due to the stupidest Anti-Piracy measures, DIVX failed. No one wants to hook up their DVD player to a phone line, no one wants wires going 50 ft from their kitchen to their living room. No one wants to buy a DVD and not own it. This went bust after one year, just one year...
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.
@@TechieZeddie He likely got an old POTS line around
Yeah, I remember DIVX. It was in the title of every movie I downloaded from Morpheus, Limewire and Kazaa. It’s a good thing the anti-piracy measures protected the movies from being illegally obtained.
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.
I used to work at Circuit City, I made sure I never sold a DIVX player. Circuit City wanted to push DIVX as the next big home entertainment format. A retail store does not have the resources to push an inhouse format as the greatest idea ever. I thought DIVX was a seriously flawed idea. Circuit City management wanted employees to purchase one to be able to better promote it. I went to the mall on a day off and bought a standard issue DVD player instead. One the day that DIVX was cancelled all promotions for it were taken down, the discs were removed from the shelves and now there was more space for DVDs. What's more is the management never offered a clear explanation as to why DIVX failed, they actually avoided they issue when it would come up a store meetings.
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 remember walking into a Circuit City and seeing a whole aisle of these things, after ten minutes of reading the info on it, I thought to myself "Man, that's a really dumb idea.."
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's worth pointing out that the DivX video codecs have nothing to do with the DIVX movie format shown here. The developers of the DivX video codecs just adopted the name as a joke to poke fun at the DIVX format.
Their reason for using the name was likely that all the aggressive anti-piracy measures at the time backfired and encouraged piracy, and DivX was very much targeting the pirates with their more efficient codec.
The same pirates who would strip out the unskippable "YoU wOuLdN't StEaL a CaR" PSA when pirating movies to save on space, by the way.
You know, that obnoxious PSA you'd only see when you rented or bought a legit DVD. The one that made piracy look cool and then scolded you for it. The PSA that had thousands of people stop buying DVDs and start pirating instead to avoid the obnoxious, unskippable anti-piracy PSA... 🤪
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.
I also love their definition of "owning" something, where you own the otherwise useless plastic circle, but not the content that is on it, which is the entire reason for buying it to begin with.
Do I really own something I have to pay someone else for every single time I actually use it for it's intended purpose ?
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…
The irony is that this business model didn’t die. Now when you buy a movie, you don’t even have the luxury of owning a disc and you still have to connect to a central authority to watch the content you’ve paid for.
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 used to work at Circuit City when this came out and we knew it was junk from the start. But the reason they went bankrupt was gross mismanagement at the highest level.
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!?
"We think people will want to build a library of discs"
Yes, of discs they can access at any time, without having to pay you for every single time they want to use it.
I know this is just a softball "make us look as good as possible" promo "interview"....but them ignoring the fact people can already do literally this without paying them a perpetual fee to access the content that is on the disc that they bought is just laughable.
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.
I remember this. There was a real sense of fear this would destroy physical media altogether at the time, and if it had won it might've. The only thing that was worse were the discs that had a dye that would darken when exposed to Oxygen and be perm dead. The containers weren't totally airtight so they'd last only a few months even if sealed. Crazy times.
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?
The most infuriating part, as someone who got on board with DVD early, was the movie studios who went the DIVX route instead of standard DVD. At the time, 20th Century Fox and Paramount studios (those are the big ones I remember but I think there were others) decided to support DIVX only. They would not put their movies on standard DVD. So you’d walk into a CC and there in the DIVX section were movies like Alien and Star Trek and none were available on standard DVD. Once DIVX went belly up, those studios relented and started releasing their movies on DVD. It was a celebratory moment for early adopters.
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. 😂
I'm just amazed you can still register a DIVX player. Holy shit.
I think he had to crack it
You can't. The service was completely shut down in 2001 and it's impossible to still play the discs. The clips he showed from the movies were obviously from other sources. You can even tell by the Pulp Fiction clips being in widescreen, even though the case of the DIVX box says it's in fullscreen (1:39).
It was horrific marketing telling people they own something they couldn't play after the 2 day period without another fee. Just idiotic.
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?
Imagine divx board of directors seeing hbo max like “well shit”
I remember DivX.
My dad bought a DVD player in 1997 or 98 when they were still a new concept, and going for like $1,000. And I remember all the wires coming out of the back of the glass doored media cabinet that sat next to the entertainment center.
He had his 5 disc CD player, vcr, VHS rewinder all in the same cabinet and sitting on top was that round-style antenna for the radio. He had all this snazzy media equipment but refused to get cable television, so the antenna may have been for the TV come to think of it.
But his DVD player came with DivX and it was a sin to unwrap a DivX DVD without permission, because as long as they where wrapped, you knew they hadn't been watched.
I think he only ever paid to re-watch a few of them. He didn't leave the phone cord plugged into it. So we had to get behind the DVD player and hook it up when we wanted to watch a DivX that we'd already viewed.
Touching any of his electronics without him around and under his supervision and explicit consent though was blasphemy.
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 🙄
I don’t understand how people they could possibly claim a better viewing experience. We aren’t THAT dumb.
You're right, but some people are unfortunately.
@@ThexthSurvivor oh. I’m dumb. But still
They basically were assuming everyone was retarded.
Twice a month... in the middle of the night... your DIVX player will sneak in to your bedroom and take a small blood sample.
This is funny😂😂😂
then they will send gnomes to take your underpants
I also seem to recall it was about this time when Circuit city went from the "upper tier" electronic store. You know the place you went to buy you high end electronics to walmartesque shopping experience. They went from knowledgeable "professionals" to hiring college students looking for beer money.
I bought the DIVX dvd player from circuit city in the 90s and paid my dad each month to put a phone line in my room. I bought a few divx dvds and soon they canceled the whole thing so they never worked again (even though I bought some of them for beyond the 2 day period). Totally forgot about divx until this video showed up on my TH-cam suggestions.
Lol. The anti piracy and limited viewing clearly killed this. On paper it sounded great, but in reality it was doomed to fail
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.
Circuit City would have failed anyway. Management couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag. DIVX only hastened the end....
It was a stupid idea from the very start. Today, our local Circuit City building is now an antiques mall. When CC rolled out Divx, it was the day when I decided that 100 percent of my electronics related purchases would be at Best Buy and Circuit City would never again see my footprints on their floor.
I had the non-DIVX version of the RCA player they showed here. It was surprisingly good. I eventually sold it because there was no way to make it region-free or play burnt DVDs. It was my first DVD player.
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.
I had a Zenith store display model I got from a Sears. It also couldn't do multi region or play burned discs. The next two I had from Norcent and Philips both could, they were both a lot more fun. I really wanted the Laserdisc/ DVD hybrid player I saw in Stereo Review but I could never find or afford it.
I remember in that time over 90% of the 1st time DVD-Video Player buyers were Blockbuster members "i was one of them" they wouldn't buy DIXV players since Blockbuster didn't have DIXV disks. So they got their 1st DVD-Video players at the Best Buy across the road.
I am not paying for a physical media that I then have to pay to watch every time I want to watch it. Divx was rightfully crushed by DVDs because the market is not falling for the scam.
This could have been like early streaming. $1 per disc to build your collection, a monthly subscription paid over the internet or Circuit City, and the phone line simply verifies your subscription with 2 small data packets.
I would love to know what the meetings at Circuit City headquarters were like. I have worked at places where no one is willing to contradict the boss. There could be a live elephant in the room and if the boss said there wasn’t, everyone would shut up (slight exaggeration, but only slight).
This DIVX idea would have made a great test of employees willingness to tell their boss that an idea was bad. It’s obvious that the commercials left out the downside of DIVX, which SHOULD have been a red flag.
DIVX was created right when the internet took off in earnest, so, the timing for keeping a BIG secret from consumers was a thing of the past, so it was a disaster CC wasn’t ready for.
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 🤔
Even the sales guy trying to sell this knows how much this was going to fail
Im gonna go to circut city tomorrow and check it out LOL
I used to travel a lot for work and they used to have the same thing in the airports. You could “rent” a movie and you had two or three days to watch it before the clock went out and you couldn’t watch it anymore. I probably “rented” about 30 movies that way.
I remember that!
As a 90s kid I always knew divx as that weird format sometimes spotted on morpheus
The only DivX I remember was the codec used for pirated movies. I do recall wondering why some dvd players had support for a codec so well known for being used in movie piracy, but I was in middle school/high school borrowing movies from friends to rip and didn’t really care.
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.
@@NickeyMouse yeah i remember those pirate data DVD with avi's and CD/DVD ROM with lots of mp3, as a kid i really liked those since they featured lots of more songs than the standard format CD.
I recall a Promotion that Playstation 2's came with 10 DVD Movies. PS2 basically made DVD the new VHS. DVD Players were stupid expensive when PS2 came out basically the same price as the games console. But just a couple years later you could get a DVD Player on Black Friday for $25. I remember that Black Friday DVD player also had DivX playback built in so you could play ripped Divx Movies on the cheap DVD player.
How did you manage to unlock the DivX part? Been looking everywhere online
Welcome to Circuit City, where service is state of the art! Circuit City was one of my favorite stores when I was a kid. I was sad when they all disappeared.
That’s neat. I didn’t know that part of digital history.
2:36 This part was my favorite 🤣🤣 Give them away and yard sales lmao great business model
If you think about it they were way ahead of their time. You own nothing now on a streaming platform. I also worked there and hated it it, working on commissions selling something and having it returned because the delivery service had no idea how PIP worked and selling them the over priced splitter with the monster cables. lol memories!
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!
I remember this but it seems like it lasted more than a year. But it did give laserdisc players a few extra years when Paramount movies (and others) would not come out on DVD because they had exclusivity with Divx. Not to mention the confusion of some with MP4 DivX formats used on the computer. This format seemed odd where I could just go to Blockbuster instead and return it without creating waste. My brother in law was all in on it. Also "gold disc DivX" seemed stupid considering that's basically just a DVD. I can only guess they liked it because of what Redbox eventually did with DVD rentals that they added license fees to Bluray discs when those went out for rental.
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.
How did you play the DIVX disc? I thought it was encrypted and since the service is gone, you can't activate the disc to play. You kinda glossed over it - something about registering the player then burning it? Can you elaborate on that? It's not enough info for us to reproduce.
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.
I am guessing some kind of hack but I am not sure.
Good thing DivX lived on as a staple format for pirated movies... I specifically remember having a cheap DVD player with a "DIVX" logo on it that was amazing because I could "allegedly" burn a movie to a 700mb CD-R and watch it on a TV instead of my computer.
That was hot sh*t back then.
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.
Soooo the "gold discs" are basically DVDs I had to pay extra for and could possibly not even buy if I wanted to, cause the studio might object.
...did they not realise this was basically an anti-pitch at this point ?
Nope. CC wasn't just stupid and misguided, but Investors actually said "YES" to this.
The DIVX gold discs never became a reality due to how short lived the DIVX format was.
Well, they did think they could sell people a DVD you pay to watch. So........
@@Tornado1994Studios, not surprisingly, also said yes to this. 🤦🏻♂️
I remember when divX was the codec of choice for pirates 🏴☠️
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
Best Buy is the main thing that bankrupted Circuit City. Equipment and media, whether it was audio, video, cameras, CDs, DVDs, VHS or computers were less expensive than the identical items at Circuit City. After the local Best Buy opened I never set foot in CC again.
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.
Ironically enough our Circuit City became Best Buy
Not gonna lie, I reallyyyy like the square case designs I wish that was slightly more common.
Everyone will want to buy a DVD that doesn't let them watch it! And we only have to buy a whole new player to do it?? Count me in! Circuit City, here I come!
I hope they're still open.
Never knew what divx was but it was the logo in the bottom of nearly every movie I ever downloaded for free. Huh, finally got my answer all these years later
Aside from DIVX, there was also the format war. I purchased an HDDVD player from Circuit City about a month or so right before that format was removed from the market. On the plus side, Circuit City gave me full credit towards a Blu Ray player, so I didn't really lose out, but that had to hurt their financials.
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.
this is the 1990s version of you will own nothing and be happy. You basically by the desk and they charge you every time you play it. The public doesn’t want that. Yet here we are 25 years later and that’s exactly what we’re doing with modern DRM and streaming.
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.
I never even heard of these kind of dvds
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.
I remember the format...avoided it like the plague
I remember reading a Popular Mechanics article back in the day on this format. My takeaway was: "why?" Renting a DVD was $5 or so and buying one was about $20. So at worst, it was $25 to own a movie forever or until the disc rot settled in. DIVX was truly destined to fail.
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?
My neighbor jailbroke our dvix dvd player and pirated the movies online back in the day so clearly it was a waste of time.
Every word of this is false. Either that or you just didn’t understand what was going on at the time.
Never even knew this format existed. Guess it wasnt out for long
Only lasted a year.
It only lasted from June 1998 - June 1999 and was exclusive to Circuit City.
So many DVD rips i got in college in the early 2000's had the DIVX logo in the beginning. It was hilarious
"Remember that selling DivX puts you at the forefront of cutting-edge technology..." -A guy who probably cut himself on that cutting edge, circa 1999.
The sad part is that Circuit City's rise was thanks to the company successfully predicting that TV's, microwaves, and VHS would all take off. But Circuit City failed a prediction here...and never bounced back. :(
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.
The fact that we can see DVIX watermarks on countless old TH-cam clips it’s probably the only lasting legacy of this format.
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.
Don't confuse DIVX (Circuit City's Anti Piracy version of rental DVDs 1998) with DivX (a video codec from the early 2000s )
So the advantages of buying a DIVX instead of renting a DVD were:
1. No need to return the DIVX to the rental store.
2. The rental period didn't start until you actually started watching the DIVX, so a person could wait days or weeks to start watching.
3. The movie could be re-rented without having to go to a rental store to get a new copy of the disc.
These seem like very meager benefits for all the cost and hassle of getting and setting up a DIVX player. Not surprised the format failed.
Never even heard of DIVX until now. 😂
Same 😂😂😂
Ahh Circuit City. The store that 95% of their movies didn't have prices on them.
I know this was a year ago but do you remember where you found information on the disc you needed to burn to register it? I can't find any info anywhere
When lawyers rule the board room....
I worked at circuit city back during these days. When they cancelled them we used to have divx disc throwing competitions 😂. We used to laugh about how much they sucked! Circuit city was such a cool company to work for though
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)
Disc golf
Those things are so hot garbage i remember they tried to sell me this while i was trying to get a tv lol but no one wanna do this mess they just want to buy a dvd play it sleep watch it the next day without having to buy it again and again and again but good video notice you used the hotline Miami soundtracks in the into of the video but yeah divix sucks
What did you do to get the DIVX discs to play? You talk about burning a disc to register the player - what did you burn to the disc?
I never even knew about this technology. Poor circuit City. They had the right idea just the wrong media format.
How the hell did you play these discs when the authentication server went dark 22 years ago?
You can't. You need an encryption key to play the discs which only exsisted on the auth. servers. Gone for two decades now. Obviously, it's not the real footage. This guy said it as a joke or is flat out lying about getting them working. Which one is it? Dunno.
Does the divx disc have the same features common on DVDs, or is it literally just the movie, no frills?
I knew Circuit City was going to close
in 2009. They did not want to service
a Panasonic VCR I had, and told me
to send it back to the manufacturer.
I said to the staff you are going to
go out of business. The store still
sits there empty. Otherwise I did like
that there was another choice to
Best Buy. 😮
Damn this is some cutting edge shit.
Whats next DVD's in the mail? Coupd you imagine such a thing?😮
At least Netflix wasn't retarded with greed.
DVD had superior rendering in my opinion.
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.
This video brought back my vivid memory of a CC employee explaining this to me, noticing my puzzled expression, and immediately shifted gears with “Personally, you’re better off buying the DVD.”
I think I was more flummoxed and entertained by the notion of the Mission: Impossible-style self-destruction of the disc after being viewed.
The concept was far too ahead of its time. Ultimately streaming would utilize the limited rental, like Amazon. Rent it, you have it for 30 days unwatched. Once you watch it, you “have” it for 24 hours and it’s gone.
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.
Hitting the sub button and seeing it go to 1k was great and look forward to more content from this channel 🎉
I remember divx as just being a video format for computers it was actually good because you can download small files and they would play HD videos pretty quick, this was 2006, and I remember the stage 6 website where you can dowmload free videos
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.
Never knew DIVX was a commercial thing. Only thought it was some underground codec
I’m not convinced he made the player and discs work. The pulp fiction clips are stretched anamorphic. The divx discs were pan and scan like a rental tape. As far as I know, these were still MPEG 2 like regular DVD, but had a layer of encryption that blocked playback unless the player was given permission.
At the time this was the biggest failure of a video format.
When Circuit Circuit City was still around, I peddled to the Blvd Mall to buy Tomb Raider Anniversary and a PS2. I was good. I didn’t need Circuit Circuit City because Best Buy was down Maryland Parkway, so was Barnes n Noble and the Blvd Mall.
I remember seeing these, but never looked into them. It cost more than a regular DVD player and I was poor so never gave them a second thought. I see the parallels between modern "ownership" of digital movies/games.... but this is the exact opposite if I understand correctly.... You own the physical copy but cannot play the digital file locked inside the physical disc without paying for a code? lmao. Imagine having a bookshelf full of DIVX discs that you'd have to pay to watch again at your own home. So if you guy the disc and watch it the same night, then want to watch it again 2 months later, you have to purchase another unlock code???
Exactly. Who in the world would want to pay every time they wanted to watch one of their DVDs. Made ZERO sense!
A great invention solves a common problem...not creates one. -F.T. Esposito
I think this format was a way to appeal to studios. But back then people didn’t consider that anti consumer practices were the death knell. These days if you’re going to be anti consumer you better have a huge eco systems in place.
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.
I had a dvd player that played divx format and these things just played on it no problem as I ended up with a box of the discs. Didn't have to register or put in codes etc. the other way around it was just to rip the divx file from the disc and convert to whichever codec format you wanted it in, using a pc and the appropriate software.
DIVX was originally a PC format and in the UK our DVD players could play the files from a disc or hard drive. We did not need to connect it to the phone line. As a disc format it was a stupid idea.
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.
I remember a lot of dvd players had the divx logo and coild play dvds with divx videos on them.
question so after you use your 2 days of play, you can activate the same disk again for another 2 days in the future?
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.
I've known about DIVX for decades, but I never knew how they worked. I always thought the discs just melted away after you watched the movie.
This is just incredible. It’s like nobody at any point in the process thought, what’s the upside supposed to be for customers? I get the upside for piracy and rental concerned Hollywood, but those are not normal people concerns.
Furthermore, the battling ideas that you somehow own a disc, but can only watch it for two days, if I’ve got that insanity right is just…
The one attractive thing is the price, but when you realize you’re just buying rentals…
There are a lot of promising mediums that just went down for one reason or another, or had their own perks and advantages. This doesn’t seem to be one.
I remember most of the newer DVD players from back in the day could play burned discs with DIVX or XVID files. Was the main way to play "aXXo" movies in my living room. I could burn 4-6 movies on a DVD and then when all the movies were watched on it I would do another batch.
divx and xvid where the same format. when divx flopped hard it was open sourced. xvid is litterly divx spelled backwards.
@@gogereaver349 You guys are thinking of the wrong DivX. This video is about the failed DIVX disc format. The DivX devs named their codec DivX to poke fun at DIVX. Then when DivX commercialized their video codec, some devs decided to continue an open-source fork which they decided to call xvid.
@@gogereaver349 DivX codec and the DIVX rental format are not related. The name of the codec is said to mock the DIVX.The codecs are off topic to this video.
Ah yes, the high-stakes period in the late 90s when floundering tech retail stores were pushing proprietary BS in the hope it would become a standard.
DIVX was an especially hilarious one. It's "protection" was the tech equivalent of a pre-broken condom.
The Bane of Digital Media and Circuit City's Existance.
I bought a Divx player back in late 1998. At that point, CC was getting super desperate, and was pricing the RCA Divx player cheaper then the nearly identical RCA DVD player. And they also offered a bunch of free DVDs with it. Never bought a Divx disc, and that player worked for probably 15 years. Up to the point where I stopped buying DVDs. The format wasnt a bad idea. Not too far off from Red Box, or streaming movies. But the technology just wasnt there. I know this is an old video, but you were able to rip a Triple DES Divx disc?
He probably found a few in a hermetically sealed case
No, it wasn’t a bad idea. It was a terrible idea.
“Look at the big brain on Brad”!!! Love that movie…
If Circuit City wanted to offer a cheap alternative to buying movies for consumers, they should have offered high quality Video CDs on 100 minute CDs instead. This type of CD is non standard and most computer CD drive readers and writers don't support it or can't read it correctly. Therefore it would be an easy form of anti-piracy.
Practically all DVD players support VCDs and the 100 minute CDs, so no need to create new hardware and they could have made bank selling this cheaper alternative to the more expensive DVD MPEG2 format at the time. There would have been no need to license the more newer expensive DivX format and implement the anti-piracy method that they ended up using (which is more of a chore and annoyance than anything). By the late 90's the MPEG1 format used for VCDs should have been much cheaper for them to license.
If you think this approach wouldn't have worked, consider this, in present day, many people that want a physical copy of a movie or TV show still buy them on DVD even though Bluray is superior in quality and have been around for years now. Why? Because it's a cheaper alternative and still looks good enough to watch on a big screen. Same thing with music, many online services that let you download music, provides them to you at a lower quality than the quality of an actual audio CD or super audio CD. But it still sounds good enough and many people are ok with that.
For anyone that has only seen crap quality on Video CDs and thinks that VCDs can't have high quality videos, let me tell you, the source video and the bitrate you use to create the VCD makes ALL the difference. Take Pulp Fiction for example, rip the movie from your DVD or Bluray disc using the program called MakeMKV. Then author it as a VCD, or XVCD like I did by using the max resolution and bitrate your DVD player supports and burn it to CD-R. The results were that it looks almost as good as the original DVD and it fits on a CD. It looks better than the DivX version shown on this video even though its on VCD! And, it looks better than anything on VHS, S-VHS, or any officially released VCD!
In the end, it wasn't a cheap alternative and Circuit City just wanted to deceive the customer into thinking it was. It was a scam from the start and deserved to fail!
Wow… good thing I’ve got all my favorite Discovery Channel shows saved on my PlayStation.
Nice to see some 90s ads for a failed product.
I had a college friend in Virgina, 1997-ish, who worked on this project. He had the cool job, and a new Honda Civic. I was very envious! Out of all of us, he was killing it, I thought. Then DIVX flopped and he was out of a job for a very long time. I think he became a pastor or something.
I can’t believe Circuit City was stupid enough to invest in such a dumb format. Who was their CEO at the time? They must’ve been fired over that.
Everyone was fired and the ceo got rich af.
I miss going to the video store on Saturday night for a good movie and some hot pop corn.
This technology did predicted the future,...it pretty much the way streaming service are you pay a small fee to watch a video from the internet anytime without owning anything cancel anytime.... ppl probably already pay thousands of dollars on Netflix hbo Amazon hulu.. you could have save your money and own the DVD instead 😂😂😂😂
Owning the DVD is really only more cost effective if you plan to watch it multiple times or lend it to friends though. I think alot of people have wasted money over the years buying movies that they only watched once. I have this problem myself but I like having a library of movies to look at so what can I say.
Not even remotely close to being the same business model.
They were ahead of their time actually. Now we all do the same shit with streaming now.