That Stupid Club

I see the K-Lite codec pack bandied about any­where any­time any­body asks for rec­om­men­da­tions for a codec pack, or as a solu­tion to play­back prob­lems. Some­times the mon­strous “ACE Mega CoDecS Pack” makes an appearance.

When it comes to codec packs less is def­i­nitely more, as exem­pli­fied by my pack of choice, the Com­bined Com­mu­nity Codec Pack (CCCP). Orig­i­nally devel­oped for play­ing fan­subbed anime, it is tweaked and tested for max­i­mum qual­ity and reli­a­bil­ity and is able to han­dle just about any­thing I care to throw at it. That one of the play­ers included in the pack is the excel­lent Media Player Clas­sic is just a bonus.

Make sure to read the instal­la­tion instructions.

The only major for­mats lack­ing are Real­Me­dia and Quick­time, and that is eas­ily fixed by installing Real Alter­na­tive and Quick­time Alter­na­tive (both are designed by KL Soft­ware, cre­ator of the K-Lite pack, so they are doing some­thing right). Also, Core­AVC (not free) is an option for slower PCs for decod­ing H264 content.

Satsuki’s Decoder Pack seem pretty nice, and XP Codec Pack is another viable alter­na­tive. They decode more audio for­mats than the CCCP, so they may be more suit­able for some peo­ple. Me, I have QMP for all my audio needs, but that’s a topic for another day.

Note: K-Lite has a “CCCP” pro­file, but it does not work well, and with none of the tweaks, so what is the point? Get the best, accept no substitutes.

Note 2: Graphic shame­lessly ripped from the offi­cial CCCP wiki.

Update (12-Jan-07)
The lat­est betas of CCCP con­tain newer builds of ffd­show with some impres­sive gains in speed, by up to 20% it seems. Of course Core­AVC is still that lit­tle bit faster, but I can now play most hi-definition (1280 x 768) H264 con­tent with­out slow downs on my 1.5 GHz Pen­tium M lap­top. Excellent!