I have not read reports stating that libavcodec (ffdshow) would produce incompliant output when fed with MPEG-4 ASP (divx, xvid) video.
Post processing is a generic filter for any video which, when configured properly, might be able subjectively increase the perceived quality at a cost of CPU time. But if your videos don't have enough bitrate, then in fact no processing can recreate the lost information. Solid state memory has become cheap enough to store DVD quality video and not rely on these tricks. Ffdshow has lots of postprocessing options which can be tweaked to your liking, because it is made also as a video processor, not decoder.
I am using ffdshow myself and the only disadvantage I see is its large size, if you compare to less than 512 kB for a bare xvid decoder. The DivX 6 installation of course is much bigger. Ffdshow will perform faster than Xvid.
Most MPEG-4 files on the Internet have bitrate low enough, so that it is impossible to notice differences in the output of various decoders.
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