ffdshow

» see ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ffdshow was on every Windows machine I touched between roughly 2004 and 2009, and I could not have told you what it was. You installed it because a downloaded file would not play, and afterward the file played. That was the whole relationship. It had no window you ever opened on purpose and no icon you clicked, just a configuration dialog with about two hundred checkboxes that you went into once, by accident, and backed out of.

Milan Cutka published the first versions in May 2002. The problem he was solving was specific to that moment: the DivX decoders of the day were either the old DivX ;-) 3.11 hack or DivX 5.02, which shipped with Gator bundled into the installer. Meanwhile MPlayer on Linux had fast, good decoders in libavcodec that Windows players could not reach. ffdshow was the bridge. It wrapped libavcodec as a Video for Windows codec and a DirectShow filter, which are the two sockets Windows exposes for exactly this, and then it got out of the way.

That design is why nobody remembers installing it. ffdshow contained no player and no container parser, so it never competed with anything. Once registered, Media Player Classic and Winamp would simply route video through it, and a machine that could not open an Xvid file in the morning could open one in the afternoon with no visible change to anything.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

The format list got long because libavcodec's list got long. MPEG-4 Part 2 was the point of the thing, which covered Xvid and every version of DivX, but it also handled H.264 and the Flash Video that YouTube ran on in its first years. On the audio side it went from MP3 through to FLAC. For a stretch in the middle of the decade, one small library was the reason a generic Windows install could open essentially any file that came off the internet.

Then there was the second half, which was the postprocessing. ffdshow would sharpen video on the way past and render subtitles over it, and the same filters could be driven from VirtualDub or AviSynth for editing work. Most people never touched any of that. The people who did treated the checkbox dialog as its own hobby.

~ the fork ~

Cutka stopped updating in 2006. What happened next is the good outcome for a GPL project with users: a group of maintainers opened ffdshow tryouts as a fork on 11 September that year and kept shipping bug fixes and new codec support until 2012. Six of the project's ten years ran without its author.

When development ended the maintainers were direct about why. Nevcairiel's LAV Filters, built on the same FFmpeg foundation, had become the better decoder, so the recommendation on the forum was to go and use it instead. A final stable build, 1.3.4531, went up in June 2014 as housekeeping. The download page is still on SourceForge behind a Cloudflare check, serving a library that nothing has needed since Windows started decoding H.264 by itself.

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