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.

Features:

- fast video decompression using optimized MMX, SSE and 3DNow! code
- support for different codecs: XviD, all DivX versions, MS WMV, MPEG-1 and - MPEG-2
- 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
- support for various subtitle formats

Download: FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder 1-07-2004 SSE2 working mirror: www.softpedia.com