CED Digest Vol. 6 No. 27

CED Digest Vol. 6 No. 27 • 7/7/2001
20 Years Ago In CED History:

July 8, 1981:
* French Premier Pierre Mauroy outlines a program to nationalize several
large corporations and most private banks, create 200,000 new
public-sector jobs, and reduce the workweek to 35 hours.

July 9, 1981:
* Prime Minister Menahem Begin closes Israel's border with Jordan to
two-way tourist travel.

July 10, 1981:
* California Governor Jerry Brown orders large-scale aerial spraying of
the pesticide malathion in an effort to wipe out the Mediterranean fruit
fly, or Medfly.
* Future CED titles in widespread theatrical release: The Cannonball
Run, Stripes.

July 11, 1981:
* Members of the Writers Guild of America announce an end to their
13-week strike against film and television producers after being
guaranteed, for the first time, a share in revenues from videocassettes,
VideoDiscs, and pay television.

July 12, 1981:
* Massive, destructive floods begin in China's Szechwan and Hupeh
provinces.

July 13, 1981:
* French President Francois Mitterrand and West German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt end a two-day meeting in Bonn, West Germany, during which they
discussed national and international issues, especially economic and
military concerns.

July 14, 1981:
* Poland's Communist Party begins an emergency congress in which
delegates are to elect leaders by secret ballot, the first such vote in
any communist country.

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Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:17:38 -0800
To: digest@cedmagic.com
From: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
Subject: DIVX Discs in Thrift Stores

Hello All:

I saw a couple DIVX's today at the Goodwill in the glass display case
for $7.99 each, an inflated price, considering that Circuit City was
clearing them out two years ago for 99 cents, and there technically
isn't a way to play them as of July 1 (although some people with active
DIVX accounts may be able to get another month of DIVX play out of their
players until the system is fully inactive).

An Ebay search on DIVX brings up a number of auctions for these discs,
some for several dollars a disc, making me wonder if people know they
can't be played any longer, or if they have them confused with the "new"
DivX. When Circuit City canned DIVX they replaced the extensive divx.com
web site with a single press release, and a while later the site
disappeared entirely. Eventually divx.com came back, with what first
sounded like a way to decrypt DIVX but was soon clarified to represent a
video compressor/decompressor named DivX with the tagline "DivX will be
to video what MP3 is to audio." So the DivX's of the movie Shrek being
sold on Ebay are CD-R's using this codec, and have nothing to do with
the original DIVX format.

--Tom
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