One can post all the CODECS in here...

[Heukelspan]

OK, allright, what are the best CODECS for .MPEG, .MPG, .AVI, .ASF!

If you know one name it in this topic!

[mikewg]

And while you're at it, can you explain exactly what a CODEC is?

[themamboman]

The AVI (and others like Quicktime, ASF and others) provide a general file structure. They don't necessarily dictate the video or audio format. The raw video/audio specifies what codec was used to compress it and is needed to decompress it.

Codec is short for compressor/decompressor. Using different techniques, codecs might be able to compress better, some are better with interlaced sources, some are better at certain resolutions, etc.

There are quite a number of codec available. If you use Windows Media Player, it will try to find a codec on the web if it isn't installed on your machine and it tries to play a file with an unknown codec. The DivX codec will fail to find one since it wasn't a real, official codec. It was based on Microsoft's V3 MPEG-4 codec.

There are several audio codecs, but I think most everyone is using either mp-3 or wma to compress the audio portions of their files.

Any of the mpeg-4 variants are most likely what you'll find in published AVI's on the net. Motion JPEG codecs are used mostly during capture and editing since they consist of all i-frames (keyframes) with no partial frames, and can give frame accurate edits. Intel's Indeo was a wavelet type codec, but I don't know if anyone uses it anymore.

Mpeg-1 is built into windows media player. Mpeg-2 doesn't naturally come with wmp. Try the elecard free mpeg-2 decoder.