Windows® Essentials Codec Pack

Bugfixes

• Fixed 64-Bit installer issues
• Fixed a lot of issues with mp4 muxer
• Better support for VC-1 in MPEG Transport streams
• Various H.264 and MPEG-2 seeking issues fixed
• Several memory leak fixes
• Subtitle fixes:
• • Don't show closed caption if "Subtitles" is not checked
  • Non-DVD subtitles: check if "Subtitles" is checked before showing subtitles
  • Setting "Maintain outside text inside screen" was not always applied correctly
  • Subtitle file could not be disabled during DVD playback
  • Duration of SSA move tags was randomly applied
  • Various fixes to alignment, line spacing, movement and positioning of ASS, SSA and SRT subtitles
  • Several crash fixes
• Fixes in the Audio mixer and LFE crossover filter:
• • Center and LFE were too loud when downmixing 5.1 -> 2ch
  • If the original sound had LFE channel, it was overwritten
  • If the center channel existed, left and right channels were ignored
• Several MLP/TrueHD/LPCM decoding fixes
• Playing a CSS-protected DVD using MPC or MPC-HC caused a crash in certain scenarios
• Fixed DVD menu positioning and freeze issue
• Fixed several crashes in WMP11 and Media Center
• ffdshow.ax failed to register when a registry key was missing
• Removed black lines in Perspective Correction filter
• ffdshow would crash when using the Grab filter and the Resize filter with aspect ratio correction
• Many fixes across multiple ffdshow components including OSD, deinterlacing, remote API, DVD and MPEG-2 playback

New and improved features

• Added support for WebM files
• Added AC-3 in MP4 support
• Added a 64-bit version(s)
• New multi-threaded H.264 decoder: ffmpeg-mt
• DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming support for the ATI Radeon HD5000 series, ASUS Xonar sound cards and Intel Clarkdale CPUs
• New color space converters:
• • Supported input color spaces: progressive YV12, progressive NV12, YV16, YUY2
  • Supported output color spaces: RGB24, RGB32
  • High quality chroma upscaling
  • Added dithering to reduce "banding"
  • Support for color primary parameters such as ITU-R BT.601/709, input and output levels
  • RGB conversion done in 11-bit or higher
  • Significant improvements in YV12 -> YUY2, YUY2 -> RGB, and YV12 -> RGB conversion performance
  • Requires SSE2-capable CPU; for better performance multi-core CPU recommended
• New RGB conversion options:
• • Output levels ("Computer monitor" or "TV/Projector")
  • YCbCr specification "Auto" (uses H.264's VUI or width > 1024: BT.709, width <= 1024: BT.601)
• Various improvements in the Subtitle filter:
• • Improved rendering quality, memory usage and performance
  • General code cleanup
  • SSA/ASS subtitles: better compatibility (support for position & move tags), better calculation of line wrapping, new dialog to configure ASS specific options. Also support added for ASS tags within SRT subtitles (SubViewer)
• FFDShowAPI: .NET wrapper around FFDShowRemoteAPI allows integration of ffdshow with third-party applications
• FFDShowRemoteAPI:
• • Improved subtitle/audio streams detection; now compatible with most filters handling the IAMStreamSelect interface
  • New command to disable FF/RW OSD
  • When using absolute positioning, x and y coordinates are now representing pixels instead of percentages
  • Added new parameter to determine the duration in which a message will be displayed
• OSD settings are now based on the current ffdshow preset; this allows turning OSD on/off using the "Automatic preset loading" mechanism
• Buffered video RAM access improves video memory access in certain scenarios
• AviSynth filter now uses AviSynth's frames for buffering which improves performance and reduces the filter's memory usage
• "Max. amplification" in the Normalization filter will only be applied after pressing "Apply"
• Better handling of DVD menus
• Improved autocrop algorithm
• Added RealVideo 8 (RV30) support
• Added soft telecine detection
• Added several new preset autoload conditions
• libavcodec is now used by default to decode Theora videos
• libavcodec is now used as Dolby TrueHD decoder instead of MLP
• Various updates to libavcodec

Download

The latest version is 3.0 (May 30^th 2010).

Requirements

• Pentium Pro/Athlon processor or higher (SSE-capable CPU recommended)
• Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, or Windows 7

Download links:

• Direct link EXE file, size: 15.6MB
• Download from FileForum
• Download from Download.com
  
• Download from Softpedia.com
  

Note to Windows 98/ME users

Windows 98/ME support has been dropped starting with version 2.0.
The last officially supported build can be downloaded here:
WECP For Windows 98/ME