What's the difference between Divx and Xvid codec?

[ZhivotSiZhiveia]

Can both of them read Divx and Xvid files?

[saraha]

Divx Is a program which plays AVI.
Xvid lets you play AVI on programs which don't normally support it.

[RakeshM]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XviD

Since XviD uses MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) compression, video
encoded with XviD is MPEG-4 ASP video and can therefore be decoded with all
MPEG-4 ASP compliant decoders. This includes a large number of media
players, in particular all the ones based on the open source libavcodec
library. See comparison of media players for a list of media players capable
of playing XviD encoded content.

XviD encoded files can be written to a CD or DVD and played in a DivX
compatible DVD player, as long as they are not encoded using features
unsupported by DivX (e.g. three warppoints instead of one), since such
features are not considered "MPEG-4 compliant" by DivX.

[athanasios7592]

I'm not sure but i don't think so.

in any case if you download the cccp (combined community codec pack) it has pretty much all the codecs you'll need

[SimonS]

They are very similar codecs, but licensed and implemented differently. Here's a cut from Wikipedia:

Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.

Xvid is a primary competitor of the DivX Pro Codec (Xvid being DivX spelled backwards). In contrast with the DivX codec, which is proprietary software developed by DivX, Inc., Xvid is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.[1] This also means that unlike the DivX codec, which is only available for a limited number of platforms[2], Xvid can be used on all platforms and operating systems for which the source code can be compiled.