Codecs are important because they are being used to compress the videos and audios into much smaller size. Compressing a video with different codec will give you different results in terms of quality of the video and also the file size. If a video is being compressed by DivX, we’ll need DivX codec to play the video or else we will only hear the audio being played but no video. There are a lot of codecs and the best way to make sure that you can watch many types of videos is by installing codec packs. Codec packs are a collection of codecs being packed into one installer and is configured by default not to have any conflicts.

There are a lot of codec packs nowadays such as K-Lite Codec Pack, XP Codec Pack, Codec Pack All in 1, Matroska Pack, Satsuki Decoder Pack, The Codec, Combined Community Codec Pack and etc… I have no idea which one is the best but I’ve been using K-Lite Codec Pack for many years now and seldom have any problems with it. The important thing is I make sure that I do not uninstall nor upgrade to the latest version because I read that you’ll start to encounter weird video playback problems after doing that.

If you have codec problems, here is something you can try first before uninstalling and reinstalling the codec pack.


Here are two tools that is able to fix some broken codecs on your Windows computer. These tools are a little old but it works.

1. Filmerit

Filmerit is a freeware application for cleaning and managing the DirectShow filters. Directshow is a very nice concept that Microsoft introduced in DirectX. Many useful filters are delivered originally with DirectX, but each application may install its proper filters, eventually replacing some original ones, and finally this process may create conflicts, and in some extreme cases block all multimedia applications.

2. Codec-Sniper

Codec Sniper is a simple, small and easy-to-use tool that will show all of the Directshow, video and audio codecs on your computer. Codec-Sniper also features a column in which you may see whether the codec is “OK”, or “Broken”. This smart application also allows you to delete any codecs that you know are old or that you don’t need.

I am going to stress again that codecs are very sensitive and don’t mess around with them when they are working perfectly fine. Both Codec-Sniper and Filmerit should only be used when you encounter problems in video playback. Both tools are portable and free, so they are going in to my USB flash drive when I go out to service computers.

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