When it comes to video codec, people think of "compression/decompression", "compressor/decompressor", and "code/decode". All these different names explain the same fact: a video codec is a program shrinking large movie files to make them playable on PC. And it is required to download codec for the media player to play the downloaded music and movie.
Before codec downloading, a point should be made clear: video codec can consist two components - an encoder and a decoder. The encoder performs the compression (encoding) function and decoder performs the decompression (decoding) function. Some video codecs include both two components while some video codecs only include one of them.
The reason of why we need to download codec can be simply explained like this: video and music files are large and it's difficult to transfer them across the Internet quickly. To help speed up downloads, mathematical "codecs" were built to encode ("shrink") a signal for transmission and then decode it for viewing or editing. Without codecs, download would take three to five times longer than they do now.
Sometimes it can be confusing as video codec and video file format have the same name. Well, we can think of a file format as a type of container which contains the data compressed by a particular codec. File formats like "MPEG", "AVI" and "MOV", etc can be used to store information encoded by different codecs (eg. AVI can contain both Divx and Xvid).
To download free codec most needed for your computer, please check out our free codec list for you here:
FOURCC | Name | Company | Link |
3IV | 3ivx D4 4.5.1 | 3IVX | Download |
DIV3 | DivX Codec | DivXNetworks, Inc | DivX codec v 6.1.0 for Windows XP/2000 DivX codec v5.2.1 for Windows ME/98 |
DIVX | DivX Codec | DivXNetworks, Inc | Download |
DVSD | DV Codec | Panasonic | Download |
DX50 | DivX Codec | DivXNetworks, Inc | Download |
GEOX | Geovision's CCTV MPEG-4 codec | GeoVision | Download |
IV50 | Indeo Interactive | Intel | Download |
M4S2 | MPEG-4 (automatic WMP download) | Microsoft | Download |
MJPG | PICVideo M-JPEG Codec v3 | IBM | Download |
mp42 | Microsoft MPEG-4 V1/2/3 | Download | |
mp43 | Microsoft MPEG-4 V1/2/3 | Download | |
mpg4 | Microsoft MPEG-4 V1/2/3 | Download | |
TSCC | TechSmith Screen Capture Codec | Techsmith Corp | Download |
WMV3 | Windows Media Video 9 | Microsoft | For Windows XP For Windows 98 For Windows 2000 |
XVID | XviD Codec | xvid.org | Download |
yv12 | YV12 QuickTime Codec 1.0a2 | Download |