- [Instructor] CoDec is a shortening
of the words Compressor and Decompressor.
It sounds technical,
and the implementation of codecs
can be extremely complex,
but it's not that difficult to understand
the way they work, if you view them as languages.
A good codec is one that stores video or sound
in a small file, while retaining
a lot of the original picture quality.
The more you compress a media file,
and we literally mean making it a smaller file
to store, usually, the more the quality degrades.
More on this in the lesson on video compression.
For you to store information in a particular codec,
you need to install it,
and codecs work a little like fonts.
You can install them easily, just as you would software.
And once they're installed,
any compatible software can use them.
For cameras, this process usually happens in the factory.
Once the media has been compressed,
usually into a smaller file,
it's a file like any other, and can be transferred
more quickly because it's usually smaller.
When you want to view media that's been compressed
with a particular codec,
you just need to have the codec installed
in your computer operating system to do it.
I'm over simplifying a little here in the name of clarity,
but if you don't have a codec installed,
you simply won't be able to view
the contents of the media file,
just as you would not be able
to understand shorthand without training.
With so many codecs available,
there are three main reasons why one might choose
one codec to store media rather than another.
And just for the record,
there are separate codecs for video and audio,
but they work on the same principles.
The first reason is that newer codecs are often better,
because like all new technology,
the developers have had the opportunity
to build on the understanding
used to create the last version.
Newer is not always better,
but in this case it usually is.
And by better, I mean storing the media
in a smaller file while retaining higher quality
with less work to encode the information
and decode it.
The second reason is that one company
might develop a great codec,
but ask for high license fee for other companies to use it.
Not wishing to pay the license fee,
those other companies might create
a comparable codec for themselves.
This can lead to quite a bit of confusion
when new technologies are being tested on the public,
with each company hoping their system will be adopted
as the universal standard.
History is full of this kind of
trial and error competitiveness,
and it's usually fairly effective
at finding a good option overall.
The third reason is that you may be working
with a house standard,
particularly if you're working for a large organization
like a television broadcaster.
For many different technical, legal, and financial reasons,
larger organizations may adopt a codec
as a standard, and insist that everyone uses it.
For you, working within the organization,
the reasons may not be clear,
but the deliverable and workflow requirements
should leave no confusion.
There have been some great efforts made
to standardize codecs and delivery specifications
for media files to make it easier
for multiple media companies to share media
without conversion.
There are quite a few settings
when choosing to compress media with a particular codec,
some of which relate to basic operations
like the frames per second,
or the frame size, while others
relate to things like the maximum amount of data
used to store the new file,
usually set as an amount of data per second.
In any case, whatever the settings,
and whatever your delivery requirements,
a codec is just the language
with which your media is described.
It's the way that it's stored.
Some codecs are more efficient than others,
and there's an enormous debate to be had
about which is the best for a particular purpose.