ffdshow is an open source decoder (and encoder) mainly used for the fast and high-quality decoding of video in the MPEG-4 ASP (e.g. encoded with DivX, Xvid or FFmpeg MPEG-4) and AVC (H.264) formats, but supporting numerous other video and audio formats as well. It runs on Windows and is implemented as a DirectShow decoding filter. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... MPEG-4 Part 2 is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 14496-2). ... DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. ... Xvid (formerly XviD) is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... H.264 is a high compression digital video codec standard written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). ... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... Logo of the DirectX Media SDK - the first time DirectShow was distributed under its current name. ... A filter is a computer program to process a data stream. ...

ffdshow video decoder configuration

Image File history File links Ffdshow_video_screenshot. ... Image File history File links Ffdshow_video_screenshot. ...

Installation and configuration

ffdshow does not include a media player and container parsers. Instead, after installation of ffdshow, compatible DirectShow media players such as Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic, Winamp or Zoom Player will use the ffdshow decoder automatically, thus avoiding the need to install separate codecs for the various formats supported by ffdshow. ffdshow is configured (shown to the right) separately from the media player, with separate video and audio settings, and can be accessed from Start/Programs/ffdshow. A container format is a computer file format that can contain various types of data, compressed by means of standardized codecs. ... Media player is a term typically used to describe computer software for playing back multimedia files. ... Windows Media Player (WMP) is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. ... Media Player Classic (MPC) is a compact free software media player for Microsoft Windows. ... Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, a subsidiary of Time Warner. ... Zoom Player is a computer program that plays video and sound files on a Windows-based personal computers. ... A Codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal. ...

Format and filter support

ffdshow can be configured to display subtitles, to enable or disable various built-in codecs, to grab screenshots, to enable keyboard control, and to enhance movies with increased resolution, sharpness, and many other post-processing filters. It has the ability to manipulate audio with effects like an equalizer, a Dolby decoder, Reverb, Winamp DSP plugins, and more. Some of the postprocessing is borrowed from the MPlayer project and AviSynth filters. Image resolution describes the detail an image holds. ... Dolby Laboratories, Inc. ... Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, a subsidiary of Time Warner. ... This article is about the open source media player. ... AviSynth is a frameserver program for Microsoft Windows developed by Ben Rudiak-Gould, Edwin van Eggelen, Klaus Post, Richard Berg and others. ...

ffdshow uses the libavcodec library and several other free, open source software packages to decode video in most common formats, such as MPEG-4 (including video encoded with Xvid, 3ivx, and all versions of DivX), H.263 and VP6 (used by sites such as YouTube), H.264/AVC, WMV, as well as numerous others. ffdshow also decodes audio in the MP3, AAC, Dolby AC3, WMA, and Vorbis formats, among others. libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data; it is written in the C programming language. ... MPEG-4 is a standard used primarily to compress audio and visual (AV) digital data. ... Xvid (formerly XviD) is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. ... 3ivx is a video codec created by 3ivx Technologies. ... DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. ... H.263 is a video codec designed by the ITU-T as a low-bitrate encoding solution for videoconferencing. ... TrueMotion VP6 is a video codec developed by On2 Technologies as a successor to earlier efforts such as VP3 and VP5. ... YouTube is a popular free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. ... H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC (for Advanced Video Coding), is a digital video codec standard that is noted for achieving very high data compression. ... Windows Media Video (WMV) is a generic name for the set of streaming video technologies developed by Microsoft. ... A portable MP3 player MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding, lossy compression format, and algorithm, designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio... Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. ... Description Dolby Digital is the trademark for Dolby Laboratories AC-3 audio coding system. ... Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a proprietary compressed audio file format developed by Microsoft. ... Vorbis is an open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph. ...

The post-processing video filters of ffdshow can be used in video editors such as VirtualDub or AviSynth, by configuring the VFW settings. In these editors, ffdshow can also be used to encode MPEG-4 video compatible with Xvid, DivX, or x264 codecs, as well as lossless video and a few other formats formats supported by libavcodec. VirtualDub is an open source video capture and linear processing tool for Microsoft Windows. ... AviSynth is a frameserver program for Microsoft Windows developed by Ben Rudiak-Gould, Edwin van Eggelen, Klaus Post, Richard Berg and others. ... Video for Windows was a multimedia technology developed by Microsoft that allowed Microsoft Windows to play digital video. ... Xvid (formerly XviD) is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. ... DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. ... x264 is a free software library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams. ...

Notes

A common misconception is that ICL SSE/SSE2 builds will decode video better than "generic" builds. In fact, the video decoders are always compiled in gcc and are usually hand-optimized; it's the ffdshow filters that benefit from ICL. Intel C++ Compiler (also known as icc or icl) describes a group of C/C++ compilers from Intel. ... SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions, originally called ISSE, Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions) is a SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instruction set designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in their Pentium III series processors as a reply to AMDs 3DNow! (which had debuted a year earlier). ...

Codec packs have been known to damage ffdshow's performance in the past. Some will override ffdshow or disrupt proper video display, and almost all will install outdated ffdshow versions.

History

The first versions of ffdshow were published in April 2002, as an alternative to the slow and buggy^{[citation needed]} DivX 3.11 and Gator-infested [1] DivX 5.02 decoders of the time, and as a way to combine the speed and quality of MPlayer with popular Windows video players. Some DirectShow decoders have since caught up to ffdshow's speed, but none match its breadth. It continues to support more formats, new and old, as FFmpeg developers add support for them. DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. ... Claria Corporation (formerly Gator Corporation) is an advertising software company based in Redwood City, California. ... DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. ...

The main developer was Milan Cutka. When he stopped updating the project in 2006, new maintainers opened the ffdshow-tryouts as a fork, where bugfixes, stability fixes, new features, and codec updates continue. The original ffdshow project can be considered abandoned and dead. This fork produces at least weekly builds, compared to the original's annual ones.

See also

free software Portal

• List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
  • Open source codecs and containers
  • Comparison of video codecs
  • Comparison of audio codecs
• Comparison of (audio/video) container formats
  • FFmpeg, cross-platform, open source, audio and video codecs suit/library
• List of other software video players
• List of other software media players
• Comparison of (audio/video) media and DVD-Video players
  • MPlayer and MEncoder (use libavcodec and libavformat from FFmpeg)
  • VLC media player/VideoLAN (uses libavcodec from FFmpeg)
  • ffdshow (uses libavcodec from FFmpeg)
  • xine (uses libavcodec from FFmpeg)
• Screencast

Image File history File links Portal. ... The following is a list of codecs. ... This is a listing of open source multimedia codecs and containers. ... This is a comparison of video codecs. ... The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of audio codecs. ... This table compares features of container formats. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... A cross-platform (or platform independent) programming language, software application or hardware device works on more than one system platform (e. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... Codec is a portmanteau of coder/decoder, which describes a device or program capable of performing transformations on a data stream or signal. ... The following is a list of video players. ... The following is a list of media players. ... The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of media player programs. ... This article is about the open source media player. ... MEncoder is a command line video encoding tool released under the GNU General Public License. ... libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data; it is written in the C programming language. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... The VLC media player is a free software media player, distributed under the GNU General Public License. ... VideoLAN is a software development project comprising two multi-platform computer programs—VLC media player and VideoLAN Server (VLS)—and several audio/video decoding and decryption libraries. ... libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data; it is written in the C programming language. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data; it is written in the C programming language. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... The correct title of this article is . ... libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data; it is written in the C programming language. ... FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, often containing audio narration. ...

External links

• Current Sourceforge ffdshow page
• Recent ffdshow builds from codecs.com, usually a few days behind the official site.
• Version history of ffdshow-tryout
• Official Doom9 support, discussion, & development thread
• Official support forum

Historical links

• Original Sourceforge ffdshow page
• CVS snapshots by celtic_druid (US) (Mirror (FR)) (Mirror (JP)) (No longer updated)
• Old speed comparisons: ASP, AVC