Instead of re-encoding his portfolio, Rota and German hacker Max Morice decided to reverse engineer the codec, which 'took about a week'. Rota hacked the Microsoft codec because newer versions of the Windows Media Player would not play his video portfolio and résumé that were encoded with it. It was altered to allow other containers such as Audio Video Interleave (AVI). The Microsoft codec originally required that the compressed output be put in an ASF file.

The video codec, which was actually not MPEG-4 compliant, was extracted around 1998 by French hacker Jerome Rota (also known as Gej) at Montpellier. ĭivX -) (not DivX) 3.11 Alpha and later 3.xx versions refers to a hacked version of the Microsoft MPEG-4 Version 3 video codec (not to be confused with MPEG-4 Part 3) from Windows Media Tools 4 codecs. The company dropped the smiley and released DivX 4.0, which was actually the first DivX version to trademark the term DivX. Although not created by them, the DivX company adopted the name of the popular DivX -) codec. The winking emoticon in the early ' DivX -)' codec name was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the DIVX system. The 'DivX' brand is distinct from ' DIVX', which is an obsolete video rental system.

Avs media player mac