A codec is a piece of software that encodes or decodes a stream of data.

Almost all multimedia movies encoded on this site use the H264 standard for video. Very old movies use DivX or XviD. Movies on this site use either Vorbis (newer) or MP3 (older) for audio.

If you can hear sound but there is no video, you need an H264 codec. There are a couple options:

• Most free media players already contain the newest codecs, so you only need to download them.

• If the media player does not contain H264 or Vorbis codecs but allows support for one (such as Windows Media Player), you may simply download the latest version of FFDShow which contains all codecs necessary to play multimedia movies on this site.

A container (such as AVI, MKV, MP4) is a format used to contain video, audio, and possibly (in the case of MKV) other data such as subtitles or tracks . Newer movies use MKV or MP4; older ones use AVI.

You will need to download a media player which supports these files. Windows Media Player will support MKV if you install the latest Matroska Splitter. It can also be downloaded at the x264 homepage as "haali media splitter".

Cross-platform

Windows

Mac