Which Is The Best & Fastest Decoder

divx 5.1 is said to be fast... 3ivx decodes all (divx 3.11, 4, 5.x and xvid) and claims itself to be the fastest mpeg layer-4 decoder available. ffdshow also decodes all and is widely known and used - said to be pretty fast too, with great postprocessing filters.

so, what do you use to decode divx movies? which of them works best for you?

Fast and high quality are two very different issues. Decoding speeds are not relevant when your machine is fast enough.

like me, not everyone has a 'fast enough' machine.

VideoLAN is a player for such a machine. Lot's of people have posted good results when other players failed. It's a plain looking player, but seems to give you more frames per second when the going is slow.

i don't think "fast" is the correct description. and that's what darth sushi is implying. one decoder isn't supposed to make the movie finish playing any quicker than another.

the difference should be which one is less CPU-intensive. and yes, i have heard things (prolly all from 3ivx's official website, tho...) about 3ivx not requiring as much CPU speed to decode movies. i believe FFDShow is also capable of decoding DivX/XviD/etc? it might be worth checking out.

i guess you should try them out and see which one works best for you. make sure to uninstall each decoder, before installing a different one, so that they don't conflict with each other or refuse to let go of format associations. personally i just use all of the separate codecs (DivX 3, DivX 5, XviD, etc), with WMP 9.

and then i guess the program you use to play the movies is another issue...

nowadays i'm using 3ivx and bsplayer to watch my movies here.

i don't use videolan because it has no built-in subtitle display (bsplayer does).

i need subtitles because i'm brazilian. ok, i can understand the dialogs, but with subtitles it's so much easier! :P and installing vobsub or any other program/filter to display subtitles takes more cpu power and slows down performance.

just wondering if ffdshow displays more fps than 3ivx, both with no postprocessing enabled.