Andrew's Blog

We welcome this post from guest blogger Andrew Van Til. Also known as Babgvant, Andy has been a longtime contributor in the HTPC space and is an expert on file codecs, formats and such. He's also the creator of the world famous DVRMSToolbox application which removes your commercials from your recorded TV programs.

I’m no fan of codec packs, more often than not they end up causing much more harm than good.  Solving the short term problem (how do I get this file to play) , but leaving behind a larger mess that often leads to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally broken with the PC as a A/V device.

The real problem with PCs (and not just in this case) is complexity; most (understandably) want the convenience and not the hassle of dealing with containers and codecs so they turn to a pack to solve the immediate need.  I completely understand that it’s a complex topic; something that everyone that has ever tried to get mystery file X to play has struggled with.  Doing it the right way is hard, where codec packs are easy. After repeating “uninstall the codec pack” more times than I care to remember, I figured it was time to do something proactively to hopefully reduce the pain.  So it is with some hesitation (and irony) that I’ve decided to roll my own “codec pack”. 

AntiPack is intended to be part guide and part installer; hopefully making it easy enough for everyone to understand what they are doing, and provide an excellent/easy end user experience at the same time.  Most important it is based on the filters I use on my system.  Most are almost completly stock (with some changes to merit to reduce the arms-race nature of many OSS filters) but some I have customized to fix issues or to make them play nice with other filters.