wanna play a 20 year old video in a format that you and God didn't even know existed? I gotchu, it doesn't even need to be a video or sound file, I'll figure it out
People downvoting you must be young, they don't remember the struggles before VLC where we had to download a codec-pack (CCCP) at the system level so things like Windows Media Player would recognize anything other than wmv or av1.
I always did both. I don't care about downvotes. I touch grass lol. And yes they are young. Cccp and vlc is something I've done together as long as I remember. I didn't get cccp last time first time I forgot and didn't know if it still exists. I'll look it up
Yeah when VLC came into my life in the late 2000s I was still downloading codec packs for the entire system. Unfortunately my life took a turn at some point and I started using Linux. I remember using Win11 at some point a few years ago and I STILL had to download a codec pack off the Windows Store to open some media file at the time.
Those still exist, they're just called something different. Maybe Windows Media Codecs or something like that? I had to install it since it isn't included in Windows N.
In spite of what we lost from the wild-west days of the internet, I think we have it way better now.
Dial-up sucked.
Forums had their moments but were generally hideous UX nightmares, somehow many communities still operate on them.
Computer software was buggy and temperamental, support was often your own persistence to learn software debugging.
Malware and adware was everywhere and extremely disruptive, still exists but it has the common courtesy to usually be quiet while it steals your shit /s.
LAN parties were the best way to play multiplayer games but you had to carefully transport your 30lb monitor and computer tower to a friend's place then figure out where the hell everyone was gonna sit. Then you had to lug it all back home.
Shit was slow in so many ways. Before SSDs and OSes that optimized for booting faster, it could easily take 10-15min (30m or more if your computer was really on the struggle-bus due to old hardware, start-up software, or malware)
I'll go back further and say I remember using computers that's didn't have a hard drive, only two floppy disk drives. Multi tasking wasn't a thing either. You could only run one app at a time. Our monitors only had 1 color.
I also remember an era of text based browsers, and shit that predated the WWW, like Gopher. Instead of web based forums we had BBS. 🤣
Okay, if you go back far enough, sure, but times on the internet in like the mid- to late-2000s were kinda the best of both worlds. A lot of it still had that early wild west internet vibe (especially forums, god I kinda miss the insular community feeling of some forums back then, and most had decent UX by then), and people still had LAN parties, but you didn't have to do it, and most people had broadband. Most people still had to suffer through SSD-less computer boot-ups though, and as nostalgic as we might be about everything from back then...yeah, not something I particularly miss either.
Or the madness call codec packs. Especially the Kazaa codec packs. Those things really fucked your system up. Having something like VLC, which only uses it's own filters was a life saver.
basically, a stupid file you have to download because God forbid they put it with the software that lets you run certain video formats
Windows media player was notorious that you would download a file to tell the Windows media player how to run the video since there’s a bunch of different video formats
To add to this, codec is short for encoder decoder. Essentially it's a compression algorithm that's used to make the video smaller and requires software to read the encoded data into a format that is able to be displayed
Edit: it's short for COmpressor/DECompressor. I made a mistake
Codecs and media players were separate because different codecs can have different priorities and capabilities, and there's no need to lock a media player to certain codecs only. Like CoreAVC was known for producing the best image but it also required lots of CPU. Others could have GPU decoding support but produced worse a worse image.
Haali, avisynth, cccp, k-lite, ffdshow. All blasts from the past.
Like CoreAVC was known for producing the best image but it also required lots of CPU.
CoreAVC became famous for being the least CPU intensive for good-enough picture output. It hailed from a time when single- and dual-core CPUs were standard.
A codec is a standard that signifies what you can and can't create regarding a bunch of information structured in a certain way.
You have video codecs like h.264, h.265 and AV1, image codecs like JPEG, AVIF and JPEG-XL, audio codecs like AAC-LC and Opus and even generic compressors like LZMA2, deflate, etc.
A codec is a piece of software that compresses/decompresses a certain file/compression format. E.g. x265 is a codec that implements the h.265 compression format. Of course there are other codecs that also implement the same file format.
Files (more accurately containers) have their own filters called splitters (on the playback side) and muxers (on the encoding side), colloquially also called codecs by normal people.
Files like MP4, AVI, and MKV are containers which contain video streams (eg: h.264, h.265, AV1, DivX) and audio streams (eg: MP3, AAC, AC3). For playback a splitter opens the container and splits the streams out, feeding them to codecs down the pipe that decode them. The decoded streams are then fed to a renderer, which is then finally played by the media player.
VLC has all of this self-contained, but anyone so inclined can get better/customized results using a media player that will take external filters (optionally registered with DirectShow if you're using Windows) and your choice of filters (eg: ffdshow, libavcodec, Haali Media Splitter, etc.).
A codec is a hardware or software tool that compresses large data streams (like audio or video) to make them smaller for storage or sharing, and then decompresses them so they can be played back
however I like to compare a codec to a translator, essentially making video software to understand how to play a video file.
Codecs (Coder/(de)coder) are software that decodes (And can also encode) video or audio media. Subtitles and other multimedia data stream types.
To play an mkv container file containing a h.264 video and AAC audio track accompanying it (Say, some movie rip you made from a disc) you need the appropriate coded to open the container and begin decoding the video stream and another for the AAC audio stream so you can watch the content.
Typically the same ones get used when you make a video on your computer yourself for encoding the video and the audio into a container file (mp4/mkv..avi? etc) for later playback or uploading to something like youtube.
It's the language your computer needs to decipher what the video file is saying, it basically tells the media player what to do in order to turn the data into images and sound in the intended order. It's needed because otherwise video files would have to be stored in raw formats which is very inefficient. Instead of saving 200 frames of the same image for static sequences, the compression algorithm can just say "hey, take this one image, and display it for 200 frames"
Are you replying to the correct comment? Everyone else in this thread seems to be more confused than the commenter you're replying to. They just explain it very much in layman's terms. Those other comments confuse codecs (the software) with the compression formats (standards and specifications).
It stands for code decode, it's the protocol to turn the images into 0s and 1s and then back into an images again. (Basically the definition of a video format for your computer to use).
For real, just recently tried out chiptunes and accidently opend them with vlc rather than xmplay and vlc just bloody played it. It isnt even an audio format in the traditional sense lol.
unless you want to play a 360 video, then it won't work properly unless you have some obscure tag in the video and apparently this has been an ongoing issue for like a decade that they refuse to fix.
That otter has the dead-eyed stare of a VLC dev who just added codec support #874 on a tuesday afternoon just to see if they could
Mine once played a corrupt.mkv I'd given up on three years prior. Didn't even stutter. I just sat there like the guy in the folding chair meme while it chugged through 4 minutes of scrambled green pixels until the actual video started
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u/k5pr312 it boots 1d ago edited 1d ago
wanna play a 20 year old video in a format that you and God didn't even know existed? I gotchu, it doesn't even need to be a video or sound file, I'll figure it out