DiVX Pro for free ...

[Brown Sauce]

[Ash]

I got it (even though I used divx only once, not any more). One good thing that divx did was to introduce custom matrices ( read about it on doom9).

BS, can persuade you to use x264? Please give it a try... up to now it's not compatible with most standalone players. tivx is an exception. But if you're into archiving stuffs (like documentaries) at the best possible encode, then x264 is the way to go. We'll be seeing more standalones that are compatible with x264 and mkv (the better container for x264, than mp4 - avi is not good).

[6ULDV8]

I have been using Divx for years, it does what it says on the tin & then some more, however, it's just one item in an arsenal of codec / gui sets that downloaders need to use nowdays.

As Ash mentioned BS is good, I also use VLC (my fav for x264 / mkv etc).

What some people forget when using these programs & codecs is that if your hardware isn't up to scratch you might not get the desired results from them.

Divx pro & some others can become bogged down by bottle necks in your PC or laptop, by lack of ram or plain old lack of CPU power.

The biggest culprit for many of todays problems in viewing encodes / rips IMHO would be hard drives...
Whilst trying to watch 'better quality' from your PC / laptop on your monitor (or as some do, on your TV from the PC / laptop) a good, tough, hard working FAST HDD is essential.
Otherwise what you will find is the dreaded frame skips & / or artifacts...
The bigger the file you try to watch, the more pressure is put on your system, the more your hard disk comes into play no matter what program or codecs you are using.

Case in point:
A Blu Ray rip of something I watched on this PC, decided to put it on the wife's laptop for her & also on my father in-law's laptop for him...
Other than HDDs both laptops are new top of the line widescreen with great graphics etc...
I swapped out the wife's HDD for something slightly bigger & faster when I was setting them both up (what she uses it for requires more room on the drive & a faster drive)...

Same file (.mkv) plays flawlessly on her laptop... all 2 1/2 hours of it, alas on the F-I-L's it makes it to about 7 min.s & starts to stutter, skip frames no matter what I use to view, no matter the codecs or settings...
It's just too big a file for the standard 5400rpm spin speed of the drive, thats even though it's using 4GB of dual chn ram, has a dual core processor & has a 4GB SD in it for 'ready boost' (Vista uses the SD as the swap file)...

See the problem here is the HDD starts at it's full speed & plays a bit of the file well, from there on in the speed can't be maintained, the performance drops.

To recap & bring this back on topic, Divx pro is great, as are many other programs / GUIs / Codec packs, but if ya' system isn't up to scratch anything used to view can be hindered.

[Ash]

I was referring BS= Brown Sauce -- I missed an 'I' in that sentence

Anyway, fortunaely I don't have any hd speed issue. I play hidef stuffs in my 4 yrs old Inspiron 8600 laptop:
Pentium M 1.5 GHz + RAM 512 MB + nVidia FeForce FX Go 5200 (64 MB) + virtual memory (760-1600 MB on c drive)

I can play up to 7000 kbps x264 encoded video data using MPC with ffdshow and CoreAVC. If thing stutters then I switch to CoreAVC.

You can also use mplayer with smplayer frontend.

Also when I play those big-fat files i don't use any other memory intensive porgramme. Increasing virtual memory also helps.

For those who're interested, I've written a small x264 playback guide (thx to hdbits)