Jérôme Rota (born 1973,
Saint-Jean-de-Védas
Saint-Jean-de-Védas (; Languedocien: ''Sant Joan de Vedats'') is a commune in the Hérault department in the Occitanie region in southern France.
Geography
Located southwest of Montpellier, the commune is composed of a series of increasin ...
) is a French
software developer
Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...
. He is also known by the name Gej.
In 1999, while he was working as a
graphic designer
A graphic designer is a practitioner who follows the discipline of graphic design, either within companies or organizations or independently. They are professionals in design and visual communication, with their primary focus on transforming ...
and a technical director in an advertising agency in France, he made the "
DivX ;-)" 3.11 Alpha
video codec
A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...
(the smiley was a part of the name) by hacking the
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
MPEG-4v3 codec
(which was actually not
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...
compliant) from Windows Media Tools 4 codecs.
His hack had the advantage of supporting the
AVI
Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram (given name), Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail (name), Abigail.
People with the given name include:
* Avi (author ...
formatted files. Initial
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...
rapid spread of the program turned into its introductions to the markets. As a result, a company was established.
The new project was first given the name ProjectMayo, and an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
MPEG-4 codec called OpenDivX was made.
It was later changed into a