[MPlayer-users] Re: AVI encoded file playback on other systems

[Jonathan Rogers]

Karl Ewald wrote:
> -vcodec divx4 calls a DivX codec for Windows from the win32 codec package
> supplementing mplayer. 

I'm pretty sure mplayer and mencoder use the Linux shared library of 
DivX, not a Win32 binary. That doesn't change the fact that it's 
proprietary free beer.

> Both for technical (better quality, better speed) and religious
> (open-source, free, platform-independently developed) point of view, I would
> recommend to prefer the lavc (libavcodec) set of codecs developed in the
> ffmpeg project and integral part of mplayer.

Don't forget there's also XviD, which is a Free Software fork of DivX 
and is completely supported by mencoder. I usually use libavcodec, but 
some reported experiences suggest that XviD may do slightly better in 
some cases. There seems to be healthy competition between the two projects.

Jonathan Rogers