H.264 codec

Alright, I guess I've resisted long enough, but since this seems to be growing in popularity I see that I may not be able to watch some new releases without it.
 
So, what is a good, free H.264 codec?

Also, google provides little help other than telling me how wonderful this codec must be.

Wikipedia points to this: http://developers.videolan.org/x264.html

Anyway, I'd like to hijack this thread with my own question: There are basically two types of video available on the web, lifelike and animation. Most of the codecs seem to be optimized for the former; why are there no special animation codecs?

>>2

 I already tried that. However, I hadn't got the latest ffdshow build, so that could be it.
 
 Also, a side note: I know how much quality jerks worship the H.264 codec, but honestly, is Divx, or Xvid really that bad? Divx can be had and running in minutes. H.264 takes back bending gyrations unless you're a 1337 h4XX0r.
Sure, everyone says the quality is great. Good for them. I don't need top notch quality. I want decent quality so it doesn't look crappy. If I want top quality I get the dvd.

It's not so much that it's better quality, than that you end up with smaller files for equivalent quality.

A recent Bleash ep came in two flavors.  Xvid and H.264.  The Xvid was 170ish MB, the H.264 was 75 MB.  I could not tell any diffrent between them (sound and video quality).

ffdshow supports h.264 playback for a while, but you have to enable it explicitly in settings I think.

I think h.264 is too cpu intensive to be a good major encoder for videos yet.