It certainly strikes a good balance between quality and file size, but the DivX video format’s popularity probably has a lot to do with compatibility.

Not only can almost any computer playback DivX files with the right codec installed, but many portable media players and set-top DVD players now support the format.

It was a logical move, therefore, for the people behind DivX the file format to launch an easy-to-use application for generating your own DivX movie files.

There are already several DivX encoding applications available and it’s often possible to obtain plug-ins to output the format from within your existing video-editing application. But rarely do these take full advantage of what the DivX codec has to offer.

The current generation of DivX incorporates support for some advanced features like subtitles, chapters and tag information. DivX Author 1.5 allows you to harness these features and build them into your DivX projects.

It can import a wide variety of file types, such as Quicktime, WMV, MPEG and unencrypted DVD discs, and then output to a DivX file or disc.

The tabbed interface works in a very similar way to many popular DVD authoring packages and offers many of the same features too. There’s a very basic editing interface to cut out the bits you don’t want, for instance, and the option to add DVD-like menu screens and interactive elements to projects, including motion video backgrounds for menu screens.

Everything is wizard-led, so you can’t really go wrong - advanced settings are available should they be required.

In our tests, it took less than 15 minutes to perform a two-pass conversion of a seven-minute DVD movie to a DivX file on a Pentium IV 3GHz system. That’s pretty fast, especially when you consider that the original file size was 487MB and the output file was only 82MB. Quality, meanwhile, was excellent.