In early 2000, Jordan Greenhall recruited Rota to form a company (originally called DivXNetworks, Inc., renamed to DivX, Inc. in 2005) to develop an MPEG-4 codec, from scratch, that would still be backward-compatible with the Microsoft MPEG-4 Version 3 format. This effort resulted first in the release of the "OpenDivX" codec and source code on 15 January 2001. OpenDivX was hosted as an open-source project on the Project Mayo web site hosted at projectmayo.com (the name comes from "mayonnaise", because, according to Rota, DivX and mayonnaise are both "French and very hard to make."). The company's internal developers and some external developers worked jointly on OpenDivX for the next several months, but the project eventually stagnated.