What is ffdshow and should I be using it?

[Hank Kinsley]

I downloaded ffdshow, thinking it was a codec pack. It turned out to be quite a few things (seemingly): many of which I had no clue about. I installed it (in attempts to have a more audio/video compatible PC) and 2 little icons kept appearing every time I played something. I have noticed that Windows Media Player has become a resource hog and often stutters and is slow to react to commands. My CPU is running between 85-100% when a video is playing in windows (PC2D 2.13Ghz, 2GB RAM, Win XP SP2) - something that I don't think it was doing before.


Can someone explain to me what ffdshow is exactly and if I should install it? Is there something better?

Thank you very much in advance

[celtic_druid]

ffdshow is not a codec pack. It is a directshow and VfW interface to various opensource libraries such as libavcodec, functions from mplayer, libdts, etc. The reason you get two icons is that it contains an interface for video decoding and one for audio decoding.

Generally ffdshow is more efficient than other decoders, so I don't know why your CPU usage is so high. Perhaps you are decoding high resolution AVC and you were previously using CoreAVC? If you go into ffdshow's settings (for audio and video) you can select what formats it does/doesn't handle as well as globally change the direct show priority.