DivX 5.2.1 vs. ffdshow 20041012...

[adamlau]

...Which one outputs superior quality vids (assuming all settings equal)? And which vid players do you guys use (DivX Player 2.6 seems to output better quality than the more featureful Media Player Classic 6.4.8.3, which outputs seemingly better quality than Zoom Player 4.10b...).

[DigitAl56K]

It depends which features you want to use.

FFDShow lets you configure numerous post-processing filters, but might not always produce the highest quality output.

DivX Player uses an integrated version of Decore, the DivX Decoder, and ensures it's using the hardware overlay.

All other DirectShow based media players will use the DivX Decoder Filter in the same way. The output quality will largely be dependant on how you configure the filter. You can change it's configuration using the tool on your Start menu or by accessing the filter properties directly in applications that permit this. Some settings will only take effect when the filter is re-instanciated.

Other quality affecting factors that are inherent on all media players are which overlay mode, if any, is available and/or enabled, and any colorspace conversion that is necessary as the video hits the graphics card. If no overlay is available, the sampling algorithm of any applied scaling filter will be critically important to quality.

Of course, when performance adaptive post-processing is used (dering, deblock) the faster your PC can decode, the better the picture is going to look in the general case.