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