Codecs for Videos

Codecs for Videos

• A video codec is an electronic circuit or software that compresses or decompresses digital video.
• It converts raw (uncompressed) digital video to a compressed format or vice-versa. 
• The device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.

• The compressed data format usually conforms to a standard video compression specification. 
• The compression is typically lossy, meaning that the compressed video lacks some information present in the original video. 
• A consequence of this is that decompressed video has lower quality than the original.
• There are complex relationships between the video quality, the amount of data used to represent the video.
• The complexity of the encoding and decoding algorithms, sensitivity to data losses and errors, ease of editing, random access.