Sorenson Media

Last updated
Sorenson Media
Company type Private
Industry Computer software
FounderJames Lee Sorenson
Headquarters
Salt Lake City, Utah
,
U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Patrick Nola (CEO)
Website sorensonmedia.com

Sorenson Media was an American software company specializing in video encoding technology. Established in December 1995 as Sorenson Vision, the company developed technology which was licensed and ultimately acquired from Utah State University. The company first announced its codec (compression and decompression tool) at a developer’s preview at MacWorld Expo in January 1997.

Contents

One of the company's best known products is the Sorenson Video codec licensed to Apple Inc. for their QuickTime 3.0 software. Since its release, Sorenson Media’s video encoding technology was used in Apple's trailer web site and video clips for film studios such as Disney, Lucasfilm, MGM, and Paramount, as well as Apple's iTunes music videos, before the switch to the industry standard H.264 format.

The company was led by its chairman and founder James Lee Sorenson; its final president and CEO was Patrick Nola. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018, and was acquired at auction by Nielsen Holdings in February 2019 for $11.25 million for their addressable advertising group. [1]

Technical service for the deaf and Sorenson Communications

In 2003 Sorenson released its VP-100 model stand-alone videotelephony product for users with hearing loss. It was designed to output its video to a deaf user's standard television set in order to lower the cost of acquisition. It also provided a remote control, and a video compression codec designed for improved video quality and ease of use with a Video Relay Service (VRS). The product received favorable reviews[ by whom? ] and is used at educational facilities for the deaf[ which? ], and elsewhere[ where? ] in the deaf community. [2]

Following the introduction of similar videophones by other electronics manufacturers, the availability of high speed Internet, and sponsored video relay services authorized by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 2002, VRS for the deaf underwent rapid growth in the United States. [2]

In May 2005 Sorenson Media split off a new company, Sorenson Communications, which focuses on products for the deaf or hard-of-hearing communities while Sorenson Media would focus on video compression software. [3] In April 2022 the private investment firm Ariel Alternatives acquired a 52.5% ownership stake in Sorenson Communications which valued Sorenson at $1.3 billion. [4] [5]

Encoding technologies

Sorenson codec may refer to any of three proprietary video codecs:

Sorenson Video

Two versions of Sorenson Video were released, both using SVQ1 as their FourCC.

Version one first appeared with the release of QuickTime 3 on March 30, 1998. The backward-compatible version two was released with QuickTime 4 on March 11, 1999, which mainly included minor improvements and optimizations to the Developer Edition of the encoder, so encoded movies would be backwards compatible with the QuickTime 3 release. Changes for version two were only made to the encoder, not to the compression format. This format uses a YCbCr 4:1:0 chroma subsampling, which means every block of eight pixels share the same color components, which can cause color bleeding across pixels. This was solved in version 3 and the Spark version which both use the more common YCbCr 4:2:0 subsampling. FFmpeg supports decoding of Sorenson Video since 2002, encoding of SVQ1 was added in 2004 for 0.4.9-pre1. [6]

Version two was given wide exposure from the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999.

The official specifications of the codec are not public. For a long time the only way to play back Sorenson Video was to use Apple's QuickTime or MPlayer, which used DLL files extracted from QuickTime for Windows.

Sorenson Video 3

This incompatible version of Sorenson Video uses SVQ3 as its FourCC.

This version was released with QuickTime 5.0.2 on July 1, 2001. It was available exclusively for QuickTime. [7] [8] Apple QuickTime later focused on other compression formats and moved Sorenson Video 3 to a separate group called "legacy encoders". [9] According to an anonymous developer of FFmpeg, [10] reverse engineering of the SVQ3 codec (Sorenson Video 3) revealed it as a tweaked version of H.263. [11] The same developer added support for this codec to FFmpeg. FFmpeg supports decoding of "Sorenson Vector Quantizer 3" (fourcc SVQ3) and Sorenson Vector Quantizer 1 (fourcc SVQ1) starting with version 0.4.7, released in 2003. [12]

Sorenson Video 3 comes with Sorenson Squeeze. [13]

Sorenson Spark

Sorenson Spark is an implementation of H.263 for use in Flash Video and Adobe Flash files. FFmpeg uses FLV1 FourCC and Adobe frame identifiers of 0x21, 0x22 and 0x23.

As Apple began to use MPEG-4 and move away from other proprietary codecs, Sorenson Media licensed Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263) to Macromedia, which was included with Macromedia Flash MX v6 on March 4, 2002. [14] [15] Sorenson Spark is the required video compression format for Flash Player 6 and 7.

Macromedia later tried to find a better video codec. Starting with Flash Player 8 (released in September 2005), the preferred video codec became VP6. [16] [17] Sorenson Spark can be still used in the Adobe Flash CS4 Professional (2008) for Flash Video files (alongside H.264 and VP6). [16] According to Adobe engineer Tinic Uro, Sorenson Spark is an incomplete implementation of H.263. [17] [18] It differs mostly in header structure and ranges of the coefficients. [11]

FFmpeg in 2003 added encoding and decoding support for Sorenson H.263. [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videotelephony. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.

QuickTime is a discontinued extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was formerly available for Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FFmpeg</span> Multimedia framework

FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects and standards compliance.

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. It was designed to be the successor of the MP3 format and generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.

Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other compression technologies, WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater for specialized content. After standardization by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), WMV version 9 was adapted for physical-delivery formats such as HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc and became known as VC-1. Microsoft also developed a digital container format called Advanced Systems Format to store video encoded by Windows Media Video.

RealVideo, or also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks — the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and as of 2008 was at version 10. RealVideo is supported on many platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and several mobile phones.

On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Video, and JavaFX media files.

Cinepak is a lossy video codec developed by Peter Barrett at SuperMac Technologies, and released in 1991 with the Video Spigot, and then in 1992 as part of Apple Computer's QuickTime video suite. One of the first video compression tools to achieve full motion video on CD-ROM, it was designed to encode 320×240 resolution video at 1× CD-ROM transfer rates. The original name of this codec was Compact Video, which is why its FourCC identifier is CVID. The codec was ported to Microsoft Windows in 1993. It was also used on fourth- and fifth-generation game consoles, such as the Atari Jaguar CD, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and 3DO. libavcodec includes a Cinepak decoder and an encoder, both licensed under the terms of the LGPL.

These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.

Avid DNxHD is a lossy high-definition video post-production codec developed by Avid for multi-generation compositing with reduced storage and bandwidth requirements. It is an implementation of SMPTE VC-3 standard.

Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.

libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gnash (software)</span> Media player for playing SWF files

Gnash is a media player for playing SWF files. Gnash is available both as a standalone player for desktop computers and embedded devices, as well as a plugin for the browsers still supporting NPAPI. It is part of the GNU Project and is a free and open-source alternative to Adobe Flash Player. It was developed from the gameswf project.

Sorenson Squeeze was a software video encoding tool used to compress and convert video and audio files on Mac OS X or Windows operating systems. It was sold as a standalone tool and has also long been bundled with Avid Media Composer.

The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.

Asao is a proprietary single-channel (mono) codec and compression format optimized for low-bitrate transmission of audio, developed by Nellymoser Inc.

HD share was a video sharing website where users could upload, view and share video clips.

Apple ProRes is a high quality, "visually lossless" lossy video compression format developed by Apple Inc. for use in post-production that supports video resolution up to 8K. It is the successor of the Apple Intermediate Codec and was introduced in 2007 with Final Cut Studio 2. Much like the H.26x and MPEG standards, the ProRes family of codecs use compression algorithms based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). ProRes is widely used as a final format delivery method for HD broadcast files in commercials, features, Blu-ray and streaming.

References

  1. ↑ "Nielsen Forms Addressable TV Ad Group After Buying Sorenson Media's Assets for $11.25 Million". Variety . 2019-02-19.
  2. 1 2 Fitzgerald, Thomas J. For the Deaf, Communication Without the Wait, The New York Times , December 18, 2003.
  3. ↑ Nii, Jenifer K. (April 27, 2005). "Sorenson Media to split". Deseret News.
  4. ↑ Politis, David (June 6, 2022). "Utah-Based Sorenson And Its New Owners Go All-In On Serving Diverse Communities". Silicon Slopes Newsroom.
  5. ↑ "Sorenson Announces Change in Ownership". Sorenson Communications. April 4, 2022.
  6. ↑ FFmpeg.org FFMpeg General Documentation - Video Codecs. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  7. ↑ Sorenson Media (2001-07-02) Sorenson Media Announces the Availability of Sorenson Video 3 Exclusively for QuickTime. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  8. ↑ Apple (2000-10-10) Apple Releases QuickTime 5 and QuickTime Streaming Server 3 Public Previews Archived 2010-09-19 at the Wayback Machine . Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  9. ↑ "Apple Mailing Lists - batch export: where is sorenson ?" (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 2009-01-16. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
  10. ↑ "Deconstructing H.264/AVC". DrunkenBlog. Archived from the original on July 24, 2008.
  11. 1 2 Larsson, Benjamin (2009-03-17). "h263-svq3 optimizations". FFmpeg-devel (Mailing list). Retrieved 2009-08-09.
  12. ↑ FFmpeg Changelog. Retrieved on 2009-08-10.
  13. ↑ Sorenson Media SV3 Pro Codec. Retrieved on 2009-08-09. Archived 2013-10-20 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ↑ "Macromedia and Sorenson Media Bring Video to Macromedia Flash Content and Applications". Macromedia (Press release). 2002-03-04.
  15. ↑ Adobe LiveDocs About the Sorenson Spark codec [ permanent dead link ]. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  16. 1 2 Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Documentation - Digital video and Flash. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  17. 1 2 Kaourantin.net (2005-08-13) The quest for a new video codec in Flash 8 Archived 2009-02-06 at the Wayback Machine . Retrieved on 2009-08-10.
  18. ↑ "Sorenson Spark". MultimediaWiki. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  19. ↑ FFmpeg.org (2003) "FFmpeg 0.4.8 Documentation - Video Codecs". Archived from the original on December 7, 2003.
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