Why would you ever install DivX when VLC exists?
That said, there are a million other codecs you can/should install in place of DivX which is fully DivX-compatible and able to decode and encode DivX video properly.
Why should a user care for this? I don't have DivX on any of my systems for years now and I've never come across a context where I needed it.
There's still a few reasons directshow is still relevant:
- Getting video thumbnails for .mkv, .ogg, and .flv files in windows explorer
- Adding postprocessing filters (deblock, aspect ratio correction, pixel shaders, subtitling) to media players that don't otherwise support it (windows media player)
- Adding AV format and container support to your existing media player, for formats that Microsoft don't bundle decoders for (e.g. H.265, VP8, theora, daala, silk...)
1. If video thumbnails don't work in Windows Explorer, Microsoft should fix that, or third parties should fix it by means other than malware installs.
2. Nobody should be using Windows Media Player. It's awful. Again, if it needs fixing, it should be fixed without malware.
3. If your existing media player lacks codecs, this can be fixed in several good ways. Malware is not the way to fix this.
I conclude that DivX is completely worthless, since it adds nothing that can't be better added in other ways, and is now aggressively evil as well.
On windows you can use FFDSHOW or LAV or XVID to decode divx.
The funny thing is that when people complain about codec packs in general it's that they bloat your system with tons of codecs you do not need, not that you get one codec for nearly everything and one for FLV.
In vlc, some of the videos that i have get slower the farther along you are in the playback stream. Yet with the Divx Player, the media plays back fine.
It's only for some media, but it's a problem nonetheless. I suspect that it may have something to do with it being a somewhat reverse-engineered codec in ffmpeg?
Getting it right was very, very hard, and some tools even came with options to "tweak" the output-stream to get things synched up, specifically tailored for the behaviour of the Frauenhofer MP3 decoder.
I suspect some videos encoded using these tools may render and synch "incorrectly" on newer players not aware of the workaround done in the past to make improper codecs behave properly, even though they may be 100% within spec.
I'm guessing the DivX-player (which sounds like a very stuck in the past kind of thing) uses old codecs and are able to account for this, by not following spec while rendering these "tweaked" video-files.
I would be very interested to fix all that.
Please mail me to give me samples, and I'll do my best to fix it.
I'm thinking of criteria such as:
No malware, no advertisements, no bloat, no phoning home, no unnecessary/forced updates, in case of mobile: no unnecessary permissions.
Recently I needed to rip a CD quite urgently and the software I used has tainted my PC like a terrible sin of the past.
<insert your favorite linux distro here>
I have a list of useful software, but I haven't published it anywhere. Maybe I should do that.
The apps are portable versions (made with permission of the original developers) that are meant to be installed on flash drives, but you can click through to the official project pages of each one to find the desktop versions.
:)