THE NEXT generation of DivX video will include official support for MP3 and MP3 Surround audio, DivXNetworks told the INQ today. While MP3 audio has been used with Divx encoded movies for yonks, the official licensing of the technology from Fraunhofer and Thomson means that the codec can be used in official / legal / commercial content created with the video format, rather than just episodes of 24 downloaded from BitTorrent. The MP3 Surround codec enables 5.1 audio to be compressed in a similar and backward-compatible way to existing stereo MP3, saving space and avoiding alienating the existing installed base of MP3 devices.