The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-Decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular movie formats and even some rare formats.
The K-Lite Codec Pack has a couple of major advantages compared to other codec packs:
* It it always very up-to-date with the latest versions of the codecs.
* It is very user-friendly and the installation is fully customizable, meaning that you can install only those components that you really want.
* It's easy to make an unattended installation.
* It has been very well tested, so that the package doesn't contain any conflicting codecs. It tries to avoid potential problems with existing codecs and even fixes some problems.
* It is a very complete package, containing everything you need to play your movies.
* There are different packages. From small to extra-large.
There are three versions of the K-Lite Codec Pack: Basic, Standard and Full.
Basic contains only the most essential things. It contains everything you need to be able to play the two most popular and widespread formats, DivX and XviD. It is small enough to fit on a single floppy. Also great for including on your movie cds.
Standard contains everything you need to play all the most commonly used formats. This package should be enough for the average user.
Full contains even more codecs. It also has encoding support for various formats. This package is for power users and people who do their own encodings.
There was also a Mega version of the codec pack with basically everything, including the Real Alternative pack.