I have a lots of DivX movie that I bought from circuit city 5 or 6 years
ago when they used to have the DivX movie that you can buy and watch for 2 days. I tried to play it on any dvd/divx capable player but it wont play on my dvd/divx player. Even on my computer it wont play.
Do you have any information or idea on how to play it on any DivX player? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
In 1998 Circuit City came up with a Pay-Per-View scheme for viewing movies at home. They invented their own format. It was called D I V X (all capital letters). This stood for Digital Video Express.
I had to type it with spaces because this site "helpfully" insists on changing it to something else. Imagine the spaces are not there.
This format is NOT the same as the MPEG-4DivX we know today. (Note the different spelling: capital D, small i, small v, capital X.)
You had to have a special DVD player to see these movies. The players were offered for sale by Circuit City, and a few other retailers and sold for an average $50 to $100 more than a DVD player, they were DVD players that could play Digital Video Express discs as well.
The idea was, the movies were scrambled and the player would only play a disk for 48 hours after you inserted it for the first time. To make it play after that, you had to pay to get a code for another 48 hours. (A bit like rental, except you kept the disk at your house instead of taking it back)
It was a dumb idea. People didn't like it. To cut a long story short, it was a huge flop. It tanked. Circuit City dropped the whole thing on June 16 1999. They lost 114 million dollars on it.
The disks are useless except as novelty coasters. They expired after 48 hours and you had to call Circuit City and pay to have them unlocked. They won't play on any hardware you can get, and they won't play on an original player because the 48 hours was up at least 8 years ago, and the whole operation was dumped by Circuit city in 1999.
