Next Up: DVDs

Hollywood fat cats, be warned. If you've been relishing the sight of record executives squirming in the grip of Napster, enjoy it while you can; you may soon be squirming yourselves. Using a new technology called DivX, video buffs can now swap copies of The Matrix online the same way audiophiles trade Metallica singles.

The name DivX--the official spelling is DivX;-), with a winky smiley face--is geek gallows humor. It's named after a home-video format that died an ignominious and expensive death last year. The new DivX, developed by French hackers, turns theatrical movies into relatively small computer files that can be transferred over the Internet. To do this, the movie is copied off an ordinary DVD using a program called DeCSS. (The legal status of DeCSS is a gray area, to put it mildly; one of its distributors is currently in court for violating copyright law.) In the next step the movie is squeezed down to a manageable file size. Your average movie takes up about four gigabytes in digital form. Using a compression standard developed by Microsoft, of all companies, and hacked by those enterprising programmers, DivX squishes movies down to fewer than 700 megabytes, small enough to fit on a CD. To watch a movie in DivX format, all you need is the DivX codec program, which tells your computer how to decompress the file, and a DivX player. You can download both player and codec for free on DivX websites such as https://www.gdivx.com and divx.ctw.cc.

DivX movies are still too large to download with a 56K modem, which means that DivX won't become a serious threat until broadband becomes more popular, but the legal fur has already begun to fly. Last week the Motion Picture Association filed suit against Scour https://www.scour.com ), a website that runs a file-exchange community popular with DivX fans and that counts among its investors Hollywood power Michael Ovitz. It's doubtful that a successful verdict will stem the tide. Most DivX movies are stashed away on private servers, hard to find but accessible to those in the know, and as with MP3, neither legal nor ethical concerns are likely to carry much weight against the temptation of free stuff.