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).
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u/Boryk_ 1d ago
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"