By Daniel Greenberg
Special to The Washington Post

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out which high-resolution, surround-sound, digital-video format will retire your VCR. Would you like regular digital video disc (DVD) or a new variant called Divx, short for Digital Video Express? You can't simply pick a DVD player with features that you like; you'll have to figure out which of two semi-incompatible formats to support. And once you pick a player, make sure you buy the right discs for it. Divx players can play DVD discs, but Divx discs won't play on DVD players. Oh, and this Divx disc will self-destruct in 48 hours.

Divx is scheduled to arrive in a store near you in the next few weeks, though it has already missed a previously promised Labor Day rollout. This format – probably the most controversial development in consumer electronics in the last decade – is essentially a pay-per-view standard, developed by Richmond-based electronics retailer Circuit City and the Los Angeles entertainment law firm of Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca and Fischer. By the magic of modern technology, the Divx player can prevent you from playing the disc again without paying for it again.

Here's how regular DVD works: You buy a DVD movie for about $20, put it in the player and watch it whenever you want.

Here's how Divx works: You buy a Divx movie for only $5, put it in the player and watch it as many times as you want in the next 48 hours. But then the movie self-destructs and will no longer play for free. To play the disc again, you'll have to pay $3.25 for a second "viewing period." Twice a month, the Divx player – which must be plugged into a telephone line – makes a midnight call over a toll-free line to Divx headquarters, sending data on what you've watched, and the charges land on your credit card.

Don't like this buy-to-rent arrangement? You can purchase unlimited plays on a Divx disc for about $15. But if you take that "unlimited" disc to a friend's Divx player, your friend will have to pay another $3.25 viewing fee. Divx players also cost about $100 more than regular DVD players.

The advantage to you, the consumer, is not having to return rented movies. When you're done watching the Police Academy sequel you rented in desperation on a Friday night, you can do what you've really wanted to do all along and just throw the (non-biodegradable) disc out. No more rushing out to Blockbuster to drop off the movie, no more late charges to accumulate.

So what's the big deal, anyway? Divx is just a disposable disc, right? Well, the first problem with Divx is that it risks confusing customers who know they want something better than videotape but aren't sure what that something should be. It took several years of negotiations for movie studios, video hardware manufacturers and the computer industry to settle their squabbling, drop their feuds and agree on a single DVD standard. This hard-won cooperation paid off, and consumers began to embrace the new format, buying about 700,000 players so far – a much faster acceptance rate than that of the CD or VCR.

Throw in a similar-but-different standard like Divx, however, and that could change. Right now, shopping for a DVD player is easy. Find a brand and price you like, take it home and plug it in. But what if some movies work only on some players? What if format anxiety drives you to pay $100 extra for a Divx-compatible player just to be "future-proofed"? Furthermore, cinephiles should note that Divx discs lack almost all of the added-value features common on regular DVDiscs – a choice of widescreen or "pan and scan" viewing, subtitles, artist interviews and so on. (See the article at right for details.)

Josh Dare, spokesman for the Herndon-based Digital Video Express company, said that its own surveys showed a friendly consumer response to Divx. He blamed the early negative reaction to Divx on first-blush skepticism of its attempt to offer "a new definition of what ownership may be, where you don't have free access to it all the time." A forthcoming, $60 million marketing campaign, he said, would help dispel confusion. Divx could help DVD, he said, because "for every Divx player sold, that's one more DVD customer."

In Hollywood, by contrast, some studios are quite eager about Divx, for one simple reason: copy protection. (It also helps that Circuit City is guaranteeing the studios – Disney, Paramount, Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and DreamWorks – that have agreed to release titles in the Divx format a total of $112 million in licensing revenue over the next five years.) Hollywood is terrified that crystal-clear digital copies will spawn a wave of piracy; this anxiety is the prime reason why nobody could buy a DVD player until the spring of 1997, years after the technology was ready. Of course, the last time Hollywood feared its own demise was the arrival of videotape – and rather than destroying the movie biz, VCRs created a vast new profit center that helps even the lamest films make money.

DVD itself carries some of the toughest copy protection yet devised, to which Divx adds other technological and billing barriers – but the history of technology suggests it's just a question of when, not if, both kinds of discs are cracked.

Divx is hardly the only obstacle DVD faces in its attempt to displace trusty but inferior videotape. Recordable discs should have arrived by now, but companies are split among no fewer than four incompatible standards in development. A write-once format, called DVD-R, has been eclipsed by a new rewritable format, DVD-RAM, which can hold 2.6 gigabytes of data on each side of a disc. It takes 4.7 gigs to store a 133-minute movie; the extra capacity in these formats is intended for computer data-storage use (or perhaps to record the first half of Titanic). Then Sony and Philips – the co-creators of the CD – broke ranks to create DVD+RW, which can hold 3 gigs per side but is incompatible with DVD-RAM. Pioneer jumped in with the 3.95 gig-per-side, also incompatible DVD-R/W format, and NEC confused the matter with its own 5.2 gig-per-side MMVFF (MultiMedia Video File Format) system. Which one will succeed is more a matter of industry politics than technological superiority, which makes picking a winner nearly impossible at the moment.

And so the absurdities continue. For instance, even as Circuit City touts the copyright-protection advantages of Divx, it has run ads in national newspapers noting that a new Go Video dual-deck VCR it sells can "copy any VHS tape – even copy protected tapes." (A Circuit City spokesman said, "We didn't review it as closely as we should have" and said the ad would be pulled.) And what were the first Divx movies the company sent to reviewers? Ransom and Liar, Liar. Expect to watch a lot more digital video dementia before this all shakes out – and don't expect to record it on anything but VHS.