So far I have only been interested in DVD and transfer of home movies to DVD. Divx is fairly new to me. Therefore I apologize for the probable stupid nature of this question: I've visited the Divx site and found out you could rent Divx movies and view them as they were downloading from the website. As it is possible to record streaming video from real or quicktime, how do they prevent you from recording the Divx download and making copies of it? I know this may be awfully stupid question. Spare me the giggles and give me a simple answer for my simple mind. Thanks.
You can record streaming media. The link in my signature has all the information you need. But a streaming rental is usually a DRM Digital Rights Management file which needs a license to play and it expires after a certain number of plays or a certain amount of time. You would then have to buy a new licence. And in the case of DivX, it is not streamed but is downloaded. You can watch the file after some of it has downloaded. The DivX site says. The DivX Player will authenticate your account information and start the progressive download of your video file. Once the DivX Player has determined that your playback speed will not catch up with the download speed (varies based on connection speed), the DivX Player will start the playback of your movie.
I think it wouldnt be too hard for a skilled programmer/cracker to add something to the DivX player to perhaps use some form of memory dump to write a DRM-free file as it is streamed! It has worked for other protections such as Apple iTunes!