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FFDSHOW - A better DivX?

21 April 2002 14:21 by Lasse "cd-rw.org" Penttinen

I just discovered a new and a very nice way to decode (watch) your DivX movies. It's a DirectShow filter FFDSHOW.

ffdshow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DIVX 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.
Features

- fast video decompression using optimized MMX, SSE and 3DNow! code
- support for different codecs: XviD and all DIVX versions
- image postprocessing for higher playback quality
- automatic quality control: automatically reduces postprocessing level when CPU load is high
- hue, saturation and luminance correction
- experimental sharpening filter
- noising (of course if you want it)
- presets
- completely free software: ffdshow is distributed under GPL

First of all, the FFDSHOW seems to consume 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.

There seems to be some bugs, but this software has been very frequently updated recently. Personally I have some resizing problems if I watch a movie full screened and jump around in other windows while watching the film. Also ZoomPlayer seems to crash with FFDSHOW, but the good old Windows Media Player 6.4 runs ok.

Well worth a look!

FFDSHOW home

Please post your comments/experiences about FFDSHOW HERE

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