w32codec-all

w32codec-all is a free project that provides users with a comprehensive collection of audio and video codecs for their Linux-based operating systems, ported from the commercial Microsoft Windows OSes.

It is distributed as a single archive that must be extracted in the /usr/local/lib/codecs/ or /usr/lib/win32 directories, which must be created by the user before the extraction process. These two locations are used by well known multimedia player applications, such as xine or MPlayer, to search and use a specific codec for the currently playing audio or video file.

Contains a wide variety of multimedia codecs

The most important video codecs included in this package are MPEG-1 (VCD) and MPEG-2 (SVCD/DVD/DVB), MPEG-4, including DivX, OpenDivX (DivX4), DivX 5 (Pro) and XviD, Windows Media Video 7/8 (WMV1/2), Windows Media Video 9 (WMV3), RealVideo 1.0/2.0 (G2), 3.0 and 4.0.

In addition, it includes the Sorenson 1/3 (SVQ1/SVQ3), Cinepak, RPZA, QuickTime, DV, 3ivx, Intel Indeo3/4.1/5.0, VIVO 1.0/2.0/I263 and other H.263 variants, MJPEG, FLI/FLC, AVID, ASV2, VCR2, and HuffYUV codecs.

Among some of the most important audio codecs, we can mention MPEG layer 1, 2, and 3 (MP3), AC3/A52 (Dolby Digital) software or SP/DIF, AAC (MPEG-4 audio), WMA 1/2 (DivX Audio), WMA 9 (WMAv3), Voxware, ACELP.net, RealAudio for COOK, ATRAC3 and SIPRO, as well as RealAudio for DNET and older formats.

The QuickTime (Qclp, MACE 3/6, Q-Design QDMC/QDM2), ALAC, Ogg Vorbis, VIVO (g723, Vivo Siren), A-Law/U-Law, (ms)GSM, PCM, ADPCM, and other simple old audio formats are also supported.

Bottom line

Summing up, the w32codec-all is an important codec pack for Linux distribution. Unfortunately, it’s no longer maintained and has been deprecated by the modern, FFmpeg, GStreamer and Phonon multimedia frameworks.