The Combined Community Codec Pack, more commonly referred to by its acronym CCCP, was a collection of

codec A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...

s (video compression filters) packed for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, W ...

, designed originally for the playback of

anime is hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japanese, (a term derived from a shortening o ...

fansub A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program, typically anime or dorama which has been translated by fans (as opposed to an officially licensed translation done by paid professionals) and sub ...

s. The CCCP was developed and maintained by members of various fansubbing groups. The name is a pun on the name of the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

; namely, the

Cyrillic alphabet , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

version of the

abbreviation An abbreviation (from Latin ''brevis'', meaning ''short'') is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word ''abbrevia ...

of its full name (Сою́з Сове́тских Социaлисти́ческих Респу́блик). As part of the joke, the project's logo features the

hammer and sickle The hammer and sickle (Unicode: "☭") zh, s=锤子和镰刀, p=Chuízi hé liándāo or zh, s=镰刀锤子, p=Liándāo chuízi, labels=no is a symbol meant to represent proletarian solidarity, a union between agricultural and industria ...

and star from the

Flag of the Soviet Union The State Flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (), commonly known as the Soviet flag (), was the official state flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 to 1991. The flag's design and symbolism are derived from ...

. The CCCP was last updated on 2015-10-18. Standalone

MPC-HC Media Player Classic (MPC), Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), and Media Player Classic - Black Edition (MPC-BE) are a family of free and open-source, compact, lightweight, and customizable media players for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft ...

and mpv are more up to date alternatives.

Purpose

CCCP was created to fulfill the following: * Alleviate the major problems caused by conflicting codec packs * Provide a video media playback standard for the

community * Be capable of playing back most common video media files and formats * Be easy to install and uninstall — even for users with no technical knowledge The pack is small and compact, containing only what is needed for most videos; it intentionally disables support for many codecs it considers unnecessary. It thus can potentially avoid problems caused by inappropriate combinations of filters by providing an all-inclusive playback solution. To view a CCCP-approved video, one must simply theoretically uninstall all other codec packs and install the CCCP. This philosophy leads to some disadvantages; since many formats are not enabled by default, they have to be manually toggled by the user if needed. Additionally, unlike many competing packs, CCCP is designed around decoding rather than encoding, and as such doesn't include many video encoders that other packs do. The CCCP is made only for the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also ...

and works with Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10. The last release to support Windows 2000 is 2010-10-10; the last release to support Windows 98/Me is 2007-02-22.

Reception

In 2006,

On2 On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company (on the American Stock Exchange), founded in New York City in 1992 and headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designed video codec technology. I ...

began recommending the CCCP as a simple decoding solution to feed video and audio to their Flix encoding application. The CCCP staff recommends to not use On2's included registry patch, but rather turn on or off any necessary codecs within the CCCP settings menu. In 2009, the German C't magazine recommended CCCP as the only trustworthy Codec pack available today.

Technical details

:''Note: Installing all of these separately will not have the same effect as installing the CCCP because the Media Player Classic Home Cinema is customized and so are all of the components' settings.'' * Gabest's FLV Splitter * Haali Media Splitter * LAV filters * Media Player Classic Home Cinema lite (custom build) * xy-

VSFilter DirectVobSub (formerly known as VSFilter) is a software add-on for Microsoft Windows (a DirectShow filter) that is able to read external subtitle files and superimposes them on a playing video file. DirectVobSub/VSFilter were formerly part of a ...

CCCP adds

Video for Windows Video for Windows was a suite of video playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows ...

(VFW) codecs and DirectShow filters to the system, so that DirectShow/VFW based players like MPC,

Winamp Winamp is a media player (software), media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Rad ...

, and

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player (application software), media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing sound reproduction, audio, video and viewing images on personal computers runnin ...

will use them automatically.

Supported formats

* Container formats: AVI, OGM, MKV, MP4, FLV, 3GP and TS *

Video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

s: H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2, Generic

MPEG-4 ASP MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual (formally ISO/IEC 14496-2) is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine t ...

(

3ivx 3ivx ( ) was an MPEG-4 compliant video codec suite, created by 3ivx Technologies, based in Sydney, Australia. 3ivx video codecs were released from 2001 to 2012, with releases of related technologies continuing until 2015. 3ivx provided plugins to a ...

, lavc, etc.), DivX,

XviD Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi mas ...

, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC,

WMV9 Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

, FLV1, and

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg containe ...

Audio codec An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompres ...

s: MP1, MP2, MP3, AC3, DTS,

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Clevela ...

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conju ...

LPCM Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the am ...

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

, TTA and

WavPack WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. I ...

Notable formats not natively supported

* Nullsoft Streaming Video .nsv *

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is ava ...

.qt .mov (Can be played back with CCCP's MPC by installing the official

software or QuickTime Alternative) * RealMedia .rm .rmvb (Can be played back with CCCP's MPC by installing the official

RealPlayer RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP ...

software or

Real Alternative RealPlayer, formerly RealAudio Player, RealOne Player and RealPlayer G2, is a cross-platform media player app, developed by RealNetworks. The media player is compatible with numerous container file formats of the multimedia realm, including MP3 ...

)

References

External links

* {{official website, www.cccp-project.net Codecs Windows-only freeware