A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. Codec is a portmanteau of coder/decoder.
In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. The different versions of the photo of the cat on this page show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression which does not degrade the data. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is much higher than using lossless techniques.
A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, codec is a portmanteau of encoder and decoder, while a device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.
JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi, with the intention of superseding their original JPEG standard, which is based on a discrete cosine transform (DCT), with a newly designed, wavelet-based method. The standardized filename extension is .jp2 for ISO/IEC 15444-1 conforming files and .jpx for the extended part-2 specifications, published as ISO/IEC 15444-2. The registered MIME types are defined in RFC 3745. For ISO/IEC 15444-1 it is image/jp2.
FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.
Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material.
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. After initially keeping it proprietary from its inception in 2004, in late 2011 Apple made the codec available open source and royalty-free. Traditionally, Apple has referred to the codec as Apple Lossless, though more recently it has begun to use the abbreviated term ALAC when referring to the codec.
Huffyuv is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format. The codec can also compress in the RGB color space.
QuickTime Animation format is a video compression format and codec created by Apple Computer to enable playback of RGB video in real time without expensive hardware. It is generally found in the QuickTime container with the FourCC 'rle '. It can perform either lossless or lossy compression and is one of the few video codecs that supports an alpha channel. Supported color depths are 1-bit (monochrome), 15-bit RGB, 24-bit RGB, 32-bit ARGB, as well as palettized RGB. As a result of reverse-engineering of the format, a decoder is implemented in XAnim as well as an encoder and decoder in libavcodec.
Α video codec is software or a device that provides encoding and decoding for digital video, and which may or may not include the use of video compression and/or decompression. Most codecs are typically implementations of video coding formats.
JPEG XR is an image compression standard for continuous tone photographic images, based on the HD Photo specifications that Microsoft originally developed and patented. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and is the preferred image format for Ecma-388 Open XML Paper Specification documents.
PGF is a wavelet-based bitmapped image format that employs lossless and lossy data compression. PGF was created to improve upon and replace the JPEG format. It was developed at the same time as JPEG 2000 but with a focus on speed over compression ratio.
Apple Video is a lossy video compression and decompression algorithm (codec) developed by Apple Inc. and first released as part of QuickTime 1.0 in 1991. The codec is also known as QuickTime Video, by its FourCC RPZA and the name Road Pizza. When used in the AVI container, the FourCC AZPR is also used.
QuickTime Graphics is a lossy video compression and decompression algorithm (codec) developed by Apple Inc. and first released as part of QuickTime 1.x in the early 1990s. The codec is also known by the name Apple Graphics and its FourCC SMC. The codec operates on 8-bit palettized RGB data. The bit-stream format of QuickTime Graphics has been reverse-engineered and a decoder has been implemented in the projects XAnim and libavcodec.
UT Video Codec Suite is a fast, lossless video codec, developed by Takeshi Umezawa and released under the free GNU General Public License. The algorithm of UT video is based on the Huffman code.
JPEG XL is a royalty-free raster-graphics file format that supports both lossy and lossless compression. It is designed to outperform existing raster formats and thus become their universal replacement.
JPEG XS is an interoperable, visually lossless, low-latency and lightweight image and video coding system used in professional applications. Applications of the standard include streaming high-quality content for virtual reality, drones, autonomous vehicles using cameras, gaming, and broadcasting. It was the first ISO codec ever designed for this specific purpose. JPEG XS, built on core technology from both intoPIX and Fraunhofer IIS, is formally standardized as ISO/IEC 21122 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group with the first edition published in 2019. Although not official, the XS acronym was chosen to highlight the eXtra Small and eXtra Speed characteristics of the codec. Today, the JPEG committee is still actively working on further improvements to XS, with the second edition scheduled for publication and initial efforts being launched towards a third edition.
The TICO codec, an abbreviation for "Tiny Codec," is a video compression technology created to facilitate the transmission of high-resolution video over existing network infrastructures, including both IP networks and SDI infrastructures, the result appears visually lossless. TICO codec was represented in 2013 by the Belgian company intoPIX.
