DirectShow filters as well as Audio Compression Manager (ACM) and Video For Windows (VFW) codecs are a requirement for Windows multimedia tools – such as Windows Media Player – to encode and decode (i.e., play back) multimedia files. K-Lite Codec Pack Full provides your system with all the codecs it needs to deal with nearly any multimedia file properly.
This free package comes in various flavors – Basic, Standard, Full, and Mega. Each pack has been designed to cover different needs. Some users will do with just the most used video file formats, such as AVI, FLV, or MP4 (Basic) while others will require a set VFW/ACM codecs to edit and encode video files (Mega). The Full version of the package reviewed here contains all the features present in the Basic and Standard versions plus a set of extra DirectShow filters and GraphStudioNext, a tool for those developers that are into building and testing DirectShow graphs. Apart from all those codecs and filters, the package includes a copy of Media Player Classic Home-Home Cinema (also known as MPC-HC), an excellent multimedia player to enjoy your music and video files on your Windows PC, Blu-ray and DVD folders included.
The installation of all the codecs contained in the K-Lite pack is completely transparent to the user. All those tiny little files are silently placed where your system needs them, and you will only find out if the installation went well when you ask your Windows Media Player or any other Windows- and DirectShow-compatible multimedia playback tool (such as Media Player Classic or ZoomPlayer) to play your favorite movies and music files. The installation process takes care of everything, configuring your Windows Media Player and Media Center so that they recognized the codecs recently installed. It can even detect and removes all those codecs and filters packs already installed on your system to avoid any collisions. The pack is updated regularly, helping you to keep all your codecs and filters to date at all times.
Apart from the above-mentioned MPC-HC player, you’ll see a copy of Codec Tweak Tool installed on your computer. This is not a tool for everyone – it requires a deep knowledge of how these little files work in order to manage, configure, and even tweak your multimedia codecs and DierctShow filters without breaking anything in the process. This little tool offers you direct access to your encoders and decoders and to how they interact with your multimedia players and Windows itself, so you are advised to use it with care and only if you know what you’re doing.
K-Lite Codec Pack Full is an excellent choice for those who want to have access to all kinds of multimedia files on a Windows platform without paying a fortune for their codecs. This is a tool developed by codec connoisseurs for multimedia lovers.
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