Information

Bundled software

During installation of the codec pack you may be shown an optional offer for a third party software product. For example Lavasoft Web Companion, a security tool that protects against malware and phishing websites.

As noted above, these offers are completely optional, and can easily be declined. The offer page has two buttons, one to accept the offer and one to decline the offer. The offered software is only downloaded and installed if you accept the offer!

The installer only shows offers when doing a fresh install. It does not offer anything when updating.

How to recognize an offer

It is easy to recognize the offer. The title of that specific page in the installation wizard is "Additional Software Offers" and it is the only page that has Accept and Decline buttons.

Why are offers included?

This allows the developers to invest a lot of their time to make improvements, provide frequent updates, and provide help to those who have problems. This is the reason why K-Lite is the most advanced, flexible, reliable, and most used codec pack.

How to automatically skip or decline the offer

You can prevent the offer from being installed by simply clicking on the Decline button when the offer is shown. But there are also several ways to do it automatically:

1) Do a silent installation using /verysilent command line parameter. This will install with default settings.
2) Install using ninite.com (which does a silent install)
3) Create an unattended installation using /makeunattended command line parameter. This allows silent install with customized settings.
4) Import this Registry script:

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\KLCP]
"NoOffers"=dword:00000001

5) Install Unchecky. That is a little tool that automatically declines unwanted offers in many software products.
https://unchecky.com/

For those who came here through the shark007.net website:

Shark007 is an untrustworthy person. So be very careful with what to believe. He tells lies and takes text out of context in order to promote his own software.

The codec packs made by Shark007 used to contain bundled software in the past as well. In his case the control over the offers was in the hands of an advertising company. Due to the poor implementation, there were several cases where offers got installed without user permission. When users complained about this he said it was the fault of the company that bundled the software, and that he could not do anything about it. I think it is scary when a developer has no control over its own software...

Shark007 likes to talk bad about K-Lite in order to "promote" his own pack. His website contains some quotes from a Microsoft representative that have been taken totally out of context. The person in question is Zachd, a former developer of Windows Media Player. The timeframe on which the quotes are based is from more than 10 years ago (!!!), long before Shark007 even started making his own packs. At that time the individual codecs that were available were much less mature and stable than they are now. Setting up codecs to play everything was a real challenge back then. K-Lite was brand new at that time and quickly became very popular because it made things much easier for users. But due to the poor quality of the individual codecs, crashes were far more common than they are now. Microsoft collects telemetry about crashes, and this contains the location of the module that is responsible. When Zachd said that many crashes were caused by K-Lite, he of course meant the codecs that were installed by K-Lite. Due to the popularity of K-Lite and the files being installed in a specific default location, these codecs had a high ranking. However, the exact same problems happened with manually installed codecs, and other packs that were available at that time.

What Shark007 doesn't know, is that K-Lite developers have worked together with Microsoft to identify and where possible fix common causes of codec stability problems. This has resulted in significant improvements to the individual codecs and also in development of new codecs. Just to be clear, K-Lite doesn't make the individual codecs. It only bundles the best available. However, K-Lite developers do help the codec developers whenever possible. Other codec pack makers have benefited from this work.
Just to say it again, this all happened many years ago! Microsoft is, and has been for a long time, extremely satisfied with the quality and capabilities of K-Lite. Microsoft Valued Professionals often recommend K-Lite due to its problems solving capabilities. Same applies to many helpdesks around the world.

People who use K-Lite are extremely satisfied. Those who report a problem get friendly and knowledgeable help. Whenever a problem exists (rarely) it gets fixed quickly. K-Lite has millions of users due to its quality and reliability. It is used by several big companies, universities, hospitals, and even in professional flight simulators.

Here is a response from Zachd on the forum of Shark007. This was of course removed by him.