DivX 6 coming to a store near you

The folks over at DivX have released version 6 of their popular video compression codec. DivX 6 is said to give 20% to 40% better compression ratios than the previous versions. They’ve also added offical MP3 audio support, which means they’ve gotten a license from Thompson Multimedia. Inside the codec itself, they’ve added a number a new features to make DivX videos more like stand-alone DVDs with chapter points, subtitling, multi-language audio and video tagging (meta tags for DivX). What’s cool, is anything encoded in DivX 6 is fully compatible with version 5 players, though the advanced features like chapters and subtitles are not supported. To make life easier for content creators, DivX is now offering a Converter tool that essentially makes encoding a drag-and-drop process. A higher quality version is available in the DivX 6 Create Bundle, which includes a player and pro version of the encoder. The Create bundle is priced at $19.99.