FFDSHOW is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies. It uses libavcodec from ffmpeg project for video decompression, postprocessing code from mplayer to enhance visual quality of low bitrate movies, and is based on original DirectShow filter from XviD, which is GPL'ed educational implementation of MPEG4 encoder.
First of all, the FFDSHOW consumes way less CPU power than original DivX codecs, even with maximum post-processing. At the same time the post-processing seems to give excellent quality results and allows more configuring than the original DivX 5 codec. It can even automaticly reduce post-processing if your CPU is getting overloaded. The noise filter adds a kind of a rasterising effect to the picture - might be useful in some cases. The alpha version also includes experimental playback for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 files (such as VCD and SVCD movies), which works pretty damn well. Only problem is that MPEG-2 playback can't play the SVCD clips directly from the CD, but requires the video to be extracted to the HDD by using VCDGear first.
What's new in this version? Changelog is here
Download: FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 28-11-2003 alpha [1.27 MB]
News source: Free-Codecs.com
