CODECS for Videos

Video coding involves compression and decompression of a video.

• The device or software which can do this is called CODEC, which stands for coding and decoding.
• A video codec is a combination of hardware and/or software that creates a binary stream of data that represents the video and audio captured by a camera.
• An encoder usually creates a stream of data that is to be transferred to a second device.
• This second device has various names such as set-top box or decoder, but it essentially reverses the process carried out by the encoder.

The most common video CODECS :

• MPEG-1(Moving Picture Expert Group).
• This is older format used by some digital cameras and older video capturing devices.
• In MPEG-1 the video compression is limited which supports only progressive output devices.
• These devices display 30 full frames per second. 
• MPEG-2.
• MPEG-2 was also used in the early days of Blu-ray Disc creation.
• Most of the newer Blu-ray movies no longer use MPEG-2.
• MPEG-4(H.264).
• This is the most common codec used in modern camcorders and digital cameras that capture to file-based devices (hard drives, memory cards, and so on).
• Now, this compression algorithm of the MPEG are used by many encoding formats, such as ASF, DivX, Xvid, mp4 (Apple, mpeg-4 encoding format) are using the MPEG-4 compression algorithm.

Video codec software used :

• Quicktime.
• x264.
• FFMPEG.
• HEVC - DIVX.

The process of video codec on HEVC software.