The Combined Community Codec Pack, more commonly referred to as the CCCP, is a collected archive of codecs packed for Microsoft Windows, designed originally for the playback of anime fansubs. The CCCP is developed and maintained by members of various fansubbing groups. The name is a pun on the name of the Soviet Union; namely, the Cyrillic alphabet version of the abbreviation of its full name. As part of that pun, the project's logo features the hammer and sickle and star from the Flag of the Soviet Union. The CCCP was last updated on 2015-10-18.
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 anime 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 Microsoft Windows operating system 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 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.
