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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.

Contents 1 Installation and configuration 2 Format and filter support 3 Notes 4 History 5 See also 6 External links 6.1 Historical links

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 with ffdshow's speed, but none matches its breadth. It continues to support more formats, new and old, as FFmpeg developers add support for them.

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. The new fork produces at least weekly builds, compared to the original's annual ones.

• List of multimedia (audio/video) codecs
• Comparison of video codecs
• List of software video players
• List of software media players
• Comparison of software media players

• 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

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• CVS snapshots by celtic_druid (US) (Mirror (FR)) (Mirror (JP)) (No longer updated)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