The DivX Corporation was the pioneer of DivX and has always produced sleek and effective video players.

DivX Web Player lets you watch DivX videos directly in your web browser without resorting to the standalone player, bringing the DivX playing experience even closer to you. DivX Web Player allows you to play videos in full screen with navigation controls, or in a separate window so you can continue browsing other sites without losing the video.

It's a particularly interesting tool for bloggers and webmasters because it allows you to embed DivX videos with a simple slice of HTML code. You can even change the skin of the player on your blog to give it an extra personal look.

On installation, DivX Web Player tries to install Google's Chrome browser but you can uncheck this option (although I'd highly recommend trying it if you haven't yet). When DivX Web Player detects a video, it offers you the chance of saving it to disk, and while it is downloading, you can still watch it.

There have been reported problems of DivX Web Player not working very well in Firefox 3, although DivX claims this has been fixed now. However, when switching back from Embedded mode, to Windowed mode, I found that the screen went black even though the video and sound continued to play.

As you'd expect from DivX however, the quality of both sound and vision is outstanding. There are also several useful preferences to choose from. By clicking on the DivX logo in the bottom-right corner of the player, you can elect to save the file to disk, switch audio tracks, control playback and switch viewing modes. There are also plenty of preferences to play with, although these could have done with a little more explanation. Most users won't know which type of processing mode to choose for example, although changing from Automatic Deblocking to Fixed Deblocking didn't seem to make much difference.

For anyone who watches a lot of DivX video online or is a big fan of the DivX player, DivX Web Player definitely won't disappoint.