Sony has hammered out a deal to bring Divx support to the Playstation 3. The move means Playstation 3 owners will be able to watch Divx encoded movies and videos from hard drive storage.

This functionality will be part of a future software update for the console, and developer tools are also being updated so Playstation 3 games can use the Divx codec for cut-scenes inside Playstation 3 games.

More than 100 million devices have been Divx certified, where the company receives a license fee for each badged device sold.

Certification for the Xbox 360 is rumoured to be coming in the near future too, however we've previously reported on Divx's founder Jerome Rota's frustration in agreeing a Microsoft relationship.

Divx's file format, which can encode high definition content, is a derivative of the mpeg4 standard and produces smaller files than mpeg2 while preserving a high degree of quality. It’s the format of choice to encode movies traded illegally on peer-to-peer websites.