A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. Codec is a portmanteau of coder/decoder.
MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg, with support from other digital scientists in other countries. Originally defined as the third audio format of the MPEG-1 standard, it was retained and further extended—defining additional bit rates and support for more audio channels—as the third audio format of the subsequent MPEG-2 standard. A third version, known as MPEG-2.5—extended to better support lower bit rates—is commonly implemented but is not a recognized standard.
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.
Video CD is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard 120 mm (4.7 in) optical discs. The format was widely adopted in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Greater China, Central Asia and West Asia, superseding the VHS and Betamax systems in the regions until DVD-Video finally became affordable in the first decade of the 21st century.
DivX is a brand of video codec products developed by DivX, LLC. There are three DivX codecs: the original MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec, the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC DivX Plus HD codec and the High Efficiency Video Coding DivX HEVC Ultra HD codec. The most recent version of the codec itself is version 6.9.2, which is several years old. New version numbers on the packages now reflect updates to the media player, converter, etc.
Motion JPEG is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image.
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.
WinDVD is a commercial video player and music player software for Microsoft Windows. It enables the viewing of DVD-Video movies on the user's PC. DVD-Video backups stored on hard disk can also be played. The player also can be used to play video and audio files in other formats encoded with different codecs, such as DivX, Xvid, Windows Media Video (video), MP3 and AAC (audio). WinDVD Pro 12 is the latest version with the most features and accommodations. However, competitors such as VLC have completely replaced WinDVD due to the lack of modern features WinDVD provides.
SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, it was officially approved as a SMPTE standard on April 3, 2006. It was primarily marketed as a lower-complexity competitor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. After its development, several companies other than Microsoft asserted that they held patents that applied to the technology, including Panasonic, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.
DVR-MS is a proprietary video and audio file container format, developed by Microsoft used for storing TV content recorded by Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
A container format or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Notable examples of container formats include archive files and formats used for multimedia playback. Among the earliest cross-platform container formats were Distinguished Encoding Rules and the 1985 Interchange File Format.
LiVES (LiVES Editing System) is a free and open-source video editing software and VJ tool, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. There are binary versions available for most popular Linux distributions (including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, Slackware, Arch Linux, Mandriva and Mageia). There are also ports for BSD, and it will run under Solaris and IRIX. It has been compiled under OS X Leopard, but not thoroughly tested on that platform. In early 2019, a version for Microsoft Windows was announced, with a release slated for in the second half of 2019.
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.
Avidemux is a free and open-source software application for non-linear video editing and transcoding multimedia files. The developers intend it as "a simple tool for simple video processing tasks" and to allow users "to do elementary things in a very straightforward way". It is written in C++ and uses Qt for its graphical user interface, and FFmpeg for its multimedia functions. Starting with version 2.4, Avidemux also offers a command-line interface, and since version 2.6, the original GTK port has not been maintained and is now discontinued.
MPEG Surround, also known as Spatial Audio Coding (SAC) is a lossy compression format for surround sound that provides a method for extending mono or stereo audio services to multi-channel audio in a backwards compatible fashion. The total bit rates used for the core and the MPEG Surround data are typically only slightly higher than the bit rates used for coding of the core. MPEG Surround adds a side-information stream to the core bit stream, containing spatial image data. Legacy stereo playback systems will ignore this side-information while players supporting MPEG Surround decoding will output the reconstructed multi-channel audio.
CRI ADX is a proprietary audio container and compression format developed by CRI Middleware specifically for use in video games; it is derived from ADPCM but with lossy compression. Its most notable feature is a looping function that has proved useful for background sounds in various games that have adopted the format, including many games for the Sega Dreamcast as well as some PlayStation 2, GameCube and Wii games. One of the first games to use ADX was Burning Rangers, on the Sega Saturn. Notably, the Sonic the Hedgehog series since the Dreamcast generation and the majority of Sega games for home video consoles and PCs since the Dreamcast continue to use this format for sound and voice recordings. Jet Set Radio Future for original Xbox also used this format.
DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVDs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia in the 2000s until it was supplanted by the high-definition Blu-ray Disc. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and an MPEG-2 decoder. Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination of MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats. Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 to 9.5 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. DVD-Video was first available in Japan on November 1, 1996, followed by a release on March 24, 1997 in the United States—to line up with the 69th Academy Awards that same day.
HTTP Live Streaming is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple Inc. and released in 2009. Support for the protocol is widespread in media players, web browsers, mobile devices, and streaming media servers. As of 2022, an annual video industry survey has consistently found it to be the most popular streaming format.
