DIVX to NIST Converter

DivX is a progressive implementation of the MPEG-4 format. It offers a significantly higher degree of video compression (comparing to another H.263 video codecs) and carries a number of revolutionary innovations of that time. To playback DivX files on PC, you can use many different programs because currently most video players support DivX even in FullHD resolution. For viewing such files in modern browsers the company developed DivX Web Player. However, the H.263 standard (which DivX implements) was created in 1996 and is currently considered obsolete. It was replaced by the H.264 and H.265 standards that are implemented in more progressive codecs such as HEVC and AV1.

SPHERE (SPeech HEader Resources) is a file format defined by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and is used with speech audio. SoX can read these files when they contain μ-law and PCM data. It will ignore any header information that says the data is compressed using shorten compression and will treat the data as either μ-law or PCM. This will allow SoX and the command line shorten program to be run together using pipes to encompasses the data and then pass the result to SoX for processing.