my priorities: a/ install as least software as possible to make things work, b/ if it possible all the software must be free and legal, c/ solution must be independent from used media player (hardest task).
let me tell you what you really need. i've splitted description of your
needs into few separate parts just to make understood it better:
there are still some old divx movies, that neither use mp3 nor ac3 (there is very low chance that you meet such rare thing) - they use windows wma standard (type 0x0161). they come from divx ;-) 3.11alpha era where the only available divx audio/video codecs were hacked ones - microsoft wanted their wma/mpeg-4 only be used in .asf, which you can create with their tools only, but our hero, gej, made it available to .avi which is not closed standard. and then came divx revolution... some oldskool divxs are using such audio encoding though. to play such movies you need to install media player classic because you can't watch them using windows media players. if you insist on playing such streams on windows media players or any other ones, you have to use not-so-legal audio codec repackaged from original 3.11alpha release named divx_audio.
dvd disks are using, mentioned before, ac3 for audio (which we already should have on our system) and mpeg-2 for video encoding. the final solution that i decided to use and i can recommend is to use media player classic which has built-in support for mpeg-2. so now you can watch, all divx/xvid stuff with *any* media player you like (including wmp - windows media player), and media player classic for dvds - if i will find free mpeg-2 directshow filter, which allows to use any media player i let you know (the second free media player that has built in dvd support is "video lan client", you can google for it by yourself).
i wonder if you like those media players... :) i don't. for a long time, with no success, i was looking a way for playing .mov .ra and .ram files with different players than their proprietary ones . today i can give you one hint. please install both, real and quicktime media players and... forget about those. that gives you set of codecs that you need and you can reuse them with media player classic (again!!) after playing a little bit with its settings. good luck.
yes. i know "real alternative" and "quicktime alternative" projects. that gives you the same effect that my solution but it will not install media players (who cares for additional few megabytes today?) and you have no guarantee that everything is properly installed and set up. and it is for sure not legal to distribute such software.
i've never met film with ogg vorbis encoded soundtrack, but i suppose it can be a quite popular standard in the future. at least some music files are distributed in such format on various p2p networks more often. if you found file with .ogg or .ogm extension or you want to pass two more tests from movieking's page there is nice implementation named oggds just waiting for you to download.
i've found some new media that i was unable to play with wmp7 and mpc (of course i don't want to upgrade to wmp9). if you have problems with playing .wvx file please install newest wm9codecs
i can asure you that there will be a lot of buzz about aacplus (aka he-aac). 32kbps aacplus streams sounds better than traditional 128kbps ones. i'm working for a solution for playing them in any player. right now you have to use some that has native support: video lan client, foobar2000 or winamp5.
you can meet sometimes .avi files encoded with intel i.263 codec (fourcc: i263). to tell you the truth the only videos i've met were amateur pr0n ones :) unfortunetely that .avi that i've spotted is using IMC format (Intel Music Coder, wFormatTag: 0x0401) in its audio track which was a beta pre-cursor to indeo audio and it is no longer supported by intel. but somebody helped us poor people with fximcaud package.
piece of software tested version you need this legal/free download ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ffdshow alpha 20030523 yes yes sourceforge ac3filter 0.70b yes yes sourceforge media player classic 6.4.8.2 yes yes sourceforge ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ oggds 0.9.9.5 sooner or later yes original site wm9codecs 6.0.2600.0 sooner or later i suppose microsoft divx_audio (hack) 4.02 decide yourself barely google for it i.263 and more 1.0 rather not yes intel fximcaud (hack) 99.10.02 rather not barely google for it
i've prepared some statistics of most popular encodings based on small sample of .avi movies (dec'03).
div3 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ div4 ++++++++ div5 +++++++ xvid +++++++++ mp3 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ac3 +++ wma +
please do not ever touch such things: angel potion and smr/navi or codec packs that include one or another (or both).
those are not codecs - some kids are changing headers (to be more techy "fourcc" field)
in regular divx movies, so you can play them after installing their "marvelous codec they invented during drinking beer". and they think it is funny, eh.
my inital document recommended mpc version 6.4.7.1, now my suggestion is to upgrade to version 6.4.8.2 that can help solving at least two problems that i've met. one was with badly prepared .avi - even if all needed codecs were installed old version was unable to play audio track, but new one was working smoothly. second problem that i've spotted was an amateur authored dvd with my friend's wedding (thanks goes to d.) - ac3filter which is on my recommendation list was unable to decode the sound (but it works fine with all pressed commercial dvds, this is the first time that it failed). new mpc 6.4.8.2 can solve that problem as well - it has built-in ac3 decoder now. if you use only mpc you can stop installing ac3filter, but if you plan to use other media players you still need this filter.