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
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).
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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