Players with native Xvid support (Windows)

[whugemann]

Hello!

We are trying to generate an Autoplay-CD for small (2 MB) xvid-coded AVIs. Our customers work on Windows computers and do not know anything about codecs (or, probably, even their own computers), so we put everything that's needed to play the AVIs on the CD-R.

In regard to the player our observations are:

* VLC is a no-go, because it takes too long to establish its plug-in database at first start from a CD. (At least 45 secs if you really strip it down to the very basic plugins.)

* MediaPlayer Classic doesn't seem to have built-in xvid support, altough it claims to have. (The only 2 MB EXE file also seems too small for a native support of many codecs.)

* Mplayer is an option but does allow little control when playing the video.

Is there any current, constantly developed player, that is smal and has native xvid support?

Wolfgang Hugemann

[sneaker_ger]

Media Player Classic - Home Cinema definitely has built-in xvid support, but newer versions might require an updated DirectX so it is probably not suitable for your task anyways.

[nevcairiel]

MPC-HC supports XVID with its internal codecs. Make sure to get Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), and not the original Media Player Classic. (Its also bigger then 2MB, around ~10 iirc)

To circumvent the DirectX requirement, you could just ship the required dll with it on the disc, it probably only requires d3dx9_43.dll, maybe one or two others, but thats easy enough to track down.

[smok3]

mpui (mplayer gui) maybe
http://code.google.com/p/mulder/downloads/list?sort=-uploaded

or smplayer (mplayer gui) for windows.
http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

[gngn]

you can strip down MPC-HC of all internal filters except the avi splitter and the xvid decoder and get a maybe ~4M exe: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1498135#post1498135

[kypec]

You could try LM's MakeInstantPlayer (http://code.google.com/p/mulder/downloads/list?sort=-uploaded) -> it should create one compact EXE that embeds the player and video together.

[sara.furry]

Of the above recommendations, which is the best one?

[lachs0r]

Most likely MPlayer2 plus a GUI frontend of your choice.
MPlayer2 itself is a good choice here because it has pretty much everything except GUI controls builtin, yet is really lightweight and doesn’t make use of anything that isn’t shipped with Windows since NT4/2000.
It gets a bit more difficult with the GUI frontends. SMPlayer is probably too bloated and slow for this task, so you’ll want to use one that lacks a few features but is faster.

And there’s GeeXboX (or the older MoviX) as yet another alternative (though probably unsuitable in this case). It’s a customizable live CD that includes (old versions of) all software that is needed in order to play most multimedia files, so all your customers need to do is to boot from that disc (most PC vendors pre-configure the BIOS to boot from CD by default anyway) and it’ll just play.
Of course you could combine both and have a stand-alone player OS as well as AutoRun MPlayer2 on Windows ;)