Because VLC is a merely player, not a system-wide DirectShow component which can be reused and composed in processing pipelines by all third party Windows-applications.
That said, there are a million other codecs you can/should install in place of DivX which is fully DivX-compatible and able to decode and encode DivX video properly.
DivX specifically is not so useful now that windows (7? vista?) bundles good MPEG-4 decoders for both ASP and AVC (but on XP-class hardware, it was more performant than XviD). I think the DivX software bundle includes an encoder, so there's that.
There's still a few reasons directshow is still relevant:
- Getting video thumbnails for .mkv, .ogg, and .flv files in windows explorer
- Adding postprocessing filters (deblock, aspect ratio correction, pixel shaders, subtitling) to media players that don't otherwise support it (windows media player)
- Adding AV format and container support to your existing media player, for formats that Microsoft don't bundle decoders for (e.g. H.265, VP8, theora, daala, silk...)
Presumably, you might want DirectShow codecs for use in something else. VLC is just a binary blob; you can't harness its power to do, say, batch watermark insertion.
Installing separate decoders for every single format is just dumb and a waste of time. Something like LAV Filters will handle pretty much everything you throw at it, and on top of that you just need a media player like MPC-HC and a decent subtitle renderer like xy-vsfilter. Incidentally, this is pretty much exactly what CCCP gives you with a simple single installer.
At this point, I think the only codec CCCP installs by default is LAV, and it may not even include any other codecs anymore; it's called a codec pack mostly for historical reasons. The main advantage of CCCP is that it has sensible default settings and a good configuration app. It also installs various non-codec DirectShow filters for stuff like subtitle support.
Gabest's FLV Splitter is a FLV decoder. Personally I do not think 2 codecs are commonly understood as a codec pack but HN strongly disagrees.
The funny thing is that when people complain about codec packs in general it's that they bloat your system with tons of codecs you do not need, not that you get one codec for nearly everything and one for FLV.
VLC is excellent player. For OS X, there is also open-source software Perian which brings support for wide range of video decoders as a QuickTime component.
I find that vlc (a la ffmpeg) doesn't implement the divx codec properly in some cases.
In vlc, some of the videos that i have get slower the farther along you are in the playback stream. Yet with the Divx Player, the media plays back fine.
It's only for some media, but it's a problem nonetheless. I suspect that it may have something to do with it being a somewhat reverse-engineered codec in ffmpeg?
Incorrect audio-sync was a known issue back in the early days of MPEG4 encoding.
Getting it right was very, very hard, and some tools even came with options to "tweak" the output-stream to get things synched up, specifically tailored for the behaviour of the Frauenhofer MP3 decoder.
I suspect some videos encoded using these tools may render and synch "incorrectly" on newer players not aware of the workaround done in the past to make improper codecs behave properly, even though they may be 100% within spec.
I'm guessing the DivX-player (which sounds like a very stuck in the past kind of thing) uses old codecs and are able to account for this, by not following spec while rendering these "tweaked" video-files.
I use Ninite to set up a new computer, there are some elements that I generally skip (Office/anti-virus trials), but it can install a lot of useful programs without having to download dozens of installers.
CDex is good but sadly Sourceforge are no longer trustworthy. As far as I know they're currently only bundling crapware with installers with the project maintainer's permission, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to rely on this remaining the case.
The apps are portable versions (made with permission of the original developers) that are meant to be installed on flash drives, but you can click through to the official project pages of each one to find the desktop versions.
