from Wikipedia the word codec is a portmanto of coder decoder or compressor
decompressor and it's a device or computer program capable of encoding or
decoding a Digital Data stream but let's put that in real people terms that the
average computer user can understand shall we first what we typically mean by
Digital Data stream is audio or video content that is stored in a format that
is easily read by computers or other electronic devices that means digital
files made up of zeros and ones rather than analog media like vinyl records
next we need to disambiguate the term codec because depending on whether we're
referring to a hardware chip or a piece of software it can actually have fairly
different meanings let's start with coder decoder Hardware when the term is
used this way it usually refers to audio gear rather than video and a codec
contains both a DAC and an ADC within
one package allowing it to convert sound
to a digital file and then allowing it to interpret digital files and turn
those back into sound with as much Fidelity as possible some losses occur
during both of these conversions however which leads us well into the more
widespread use of the term codec software codecs these are computer
programs that take the original Source video or audio data and pack it up in a
specific format that adheres to a documented standard that will allow it
to be easily interpreted by other devices or pieces of software that are
capable of utilizing the the same codec but why would you want to do that you
might ask I was trying to play a movie on my computer and it said I didn't have
the codec installed and it was a pain in the patoo why can't everything just be
sent in its original form or at the very least why can't everything use the same
codec great question in a perfect world
we would never compress or convert anything because aside from the
inconvenience and I alluded to this before most codecs are what is known as
lossy which means that we're losing some of the Fidelity of the video or audio
recording when we convert to them unfortunately though in the real world
the logistics of uncompressed media files are a nightmare a 10minute HD
video that you download from YouTube might be a couple hundred megabytes
whereas a 12bit raw file of the same length and resolution can be easily over
60 gigs try streaming that kind of data over your internet connection lossless
codecs are a way around this degradation of quality but compared to lossi codex
their file sizes are still very large and and or they can be very processor
intensive to encode and decode so the most common solution is to use a lossy
codec at high bit rate that is more data per second in the Stream if you want
high quality playback without files that are so large you can't store them or
easily send them anywhere but there's no one right answer some codecs are best
for high quality While others maintain better playback on unreliable
connections While others still are designed to keep latency or delay very
very low and that is why we need a wide variety of audio and video codecs that
are optimized for different uses the last thing I'll touch on is containers
an example is MKV or. Avi these are basically just easily recognizable
wrappers that contain a number of media streams uh for example video audio uh
navigation menu and some subtitle files now many people equate containers with
codex because there are file types like
MP3 or JPEG that act as a container but
can only contain a single file type so
that's where the confusion comes from regular containers by contrast can
contain media files that utilize a wide variety of different codecs and if all
of this is still pretty confusing and you just wanted an answer to like how to
play your media files don't worry there's an easy fix you can download VLC
media player which contains most of the codecs you'll need on a daily basis or
if you don't like VC you can install pccp Codec Pack which installs media
player classic and a wide variety of different codecs on your system so you
basically won't have to think about this anymore all right so now with all this
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