MXF to DivX Converter

Convert MXF to DivX Online

Someone handed you an MXF — the SMPTE ST 377-1 broadcast wrapper that comes off Sony XDCAM decks, Panasonic P2 cards and Avid systems — and the machine you need to play it on wants DivX. This converter re-encodes the video inside that wrapper to MPEG-4 Part 2 (the standard DivX brands) and writes it out as a .divx file you can hand to an older set-top player, media box or DivX-era player app. One thing worth knowing up front: the video codec on this page is fixed to DivX, so the choices that matter are the audio codec, the quality control and the frame size.

How to Convert MXF to DivX

1. Upload Your MXF File: Drag the .mxf onto the page or click "Add Files". Several clips can be queued at once and all of them are converted with the same settings.
2. Pick the Audio Codec: Open Advanced Options. Video Codec is pinned to DivX here, so Audio Codec is the real choice — it opens on MP3, which is what DivX-era players expect. AC-3 keeps a 5.1 mix intact; PCM 16-bit Little Endian keeps the samples untouched at the cost of size.
3. Set File Compression and Video Resolution: File Compression opens on Quality Preset at "Very High". Constraint Quality, Constant Bitrate, Variable Bitrate and Specific file size are the alternatives, and Video resolution opens on "Keep original" — the section below explains which of these you actually want on a broadcast master.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared.

What Changes Between the MXF and the DivX

Choosing the Right Quality Control

Broadcast masters are high-bitrate by design, which makes the File Compression choice matter more here than it would on a phone clip:

Because Quality Preset aims above the source on the rung the page opens on, an untouched broadcast master will not shrink on its own. Medium is the first preset that targets less than the source bitrate.

The other lever that matters on a broadcast master is length. MXF files from a deck or a card are often the whole take rather than the shot you need, and a .divx you are sending to a set-top box rarely needs all of it. The Trim control on this page takes a start time and a duration in either plain seconds or HH:MM:SS.sss, and cutting the clip down before the encode is by far the cheapest way to shrink both the output and the upload.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my download called .divx instead of .avi, and will anything open it?

Because .divx is a codec name that got used as a file extension. The file this converter produces is an AVI structure — it begins with the standard RIFF … AVI header — just carrying a .divx name because that is what you asked for. DivX-branded players and set-top boxes look for that extension, which is exactly why it exists. If anything refuses to open it, rename the file to .avi and it will behave like any other AVI; nothing inside the file changes, only the name.

My MXF has several audio tracks — which one ends up in the DivX?

The one with the most channels. This page has no track picker and the pipeline does not map streams explicitly, so the encoder's default selection rule decides: it takes the audio stream with the highest channel count, and if several tie it takes the lowest-numbered one. A master carrying two discrete mono tracks plus a stereo pair will hand you the stereo pair and drop the mono tracks. If you need a specific mic, language or stem, isolate it in your NLE before converting.

Is DivX the same thing as Xvid?

They are two implementations of the same underlying standard — MPEG-4 Part 2, Advanced Simple Profile. DivX was the commercial one that set-top manufacturers licensed and certified against; Xvid is the open-source encoder that grew up alongside it. On this site they route to different encoders internally, so the files are not bit-identical, but a player that decodes one will normally decode the other. Pick DivX if the device or software you are targeting says "DivX" on it, and MXF to AVI if you would rather have a plain .avi and choose the codec yourself.

The quality field is labelled "CRF" — what scale is it really on?

A 1–31 MPEG quantiser, where lower means better quality and a bigger file. That is the opposite ballpark to the 18–28 numbers people know from H.264, and the field does not open on a considered default, so set it deliberately. We ran the same three-second 1280×720 test clip through the MPEG-4 encoder behind DivX at several values: 2 produced roughly 6.5 MB, 5 about 2.9 MB, 10 about 1.5 MB and 23 about 0.5 MB. Typing 23 out of habit therefore lands you near the worst end of the scale, not in the middle. Start around 3–5 for a good-looking copy.

Will an old DivX-certified DVD player actually play this file?

Only if you give it a file it was built for. Those players were designed around standard-definition material, so a 1080i broadcast master re-encoded at full frame size and full bitrate will usually be refused even though the codec is right. Set Video resolution to "Width x Height" and enter an SD frame size — 720×576 for PAL-region hardware, 720×480 for NTSC — then use Constraint Quality with a modest Max bitrate ceiling. Hardware from that era is far more forgiving about picture quality than about resolution and bitrate.

Why did my DivX come out bigger than I expected?

Almost always because Quality Preset was left on the rung it opens on, which targets 1.32× your source's video bitrate. MXF masters are deliberately lightly compressed — a 50 Mbps XDCAM file aimed at 1.32× is aiming at roughly 66 Mbps. Drop to Medium or lower, switch to "Specific file size" and name a figure, or use Constraint Quality with a Max bitrate cap. MPEG-4 Part 2 is also simply less efficient per megabyte than anything modern; if size is what you care about, MXF to MP4 with H.264 will beat it comfortably.

My 16:9 footage came out looking squashed — what happened?

Your master is anamorphic. Broadcast MXF very often uses non-square pixels — 1440×1080 or 720×576 stored narrow and flagged as widescreen — and resizing normalises the output to square pixels, which discards that flag. The fix is to stop relying on the height presets and use the "Width x Height" option instead, typing the display geometry you want (1280×720, 1920×1080, 1024×576). Leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" also sidesteps the problem entirely, because nothing is rescaled.

What happens to my MXF after the conversion?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted on our servers and then deleted automatically along with the output after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark, and nothing is shared or made public. Camera masters are large files, so the upload itself is usually the slow part of the job — if you only need a section, trimming first with Video Cutter is the fastest way to shorten it.