CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) 2008.09.18

The full title is the Combined Community Codec Pack. Actually, it’s more like a filter pack than a codec pack but filter doesn’t begin with C and we wanted a good acronym. The name is also a pun on the Russian name Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, which is transliterated into the Latin alphabet as “Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik”, or “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, abbreviated as “СССР” or “USSR”.

Why Should I Use the CCCP?
Because we couldn’t find a codec pack that worked in all the cases. Other codec packs tend to either randomly not work, break the system, or install far too much cruft. With the CCCP, we KNOW that when you install it properly, it just works. You don’t need to mess around in the options to get it to work, and chances are it will resolve any other conflicts on install as well. We invented the CCCP so we can say “Uninstall everything else, install the pack and live forever happy”. That said, for the adventurous there are pages of options available to tweak if you feel like it…

The CCCP was created to replace the filter packs provided by several anime fansub groups into a single reliable pack capable of decoding practically any group’s files - without breaking compatibility for other formats. Since then we’ve grown into a pack that can decode more or less anything that you will run into during your travels on the internet. We’re supported and endorsed by a number of groups…

A lot of things… but remember that the goal of CCCP isn’t to decode everything, but to support sensible releases. ffdshow can decode more video formats than listed here, but most of the formats are turned off with the CCCP default settings. If you need any of them, you can turn them on yourself in the relevant filter configuration dialog.