According its pseudonymous authors the DivX codec - no relation to Circuit City's now defunct DIVX digital video disk player - is based on Microsoft's MPEG-4 video technology, with the addition of an MP3 audio stream. Since a DivX-compressed movie … [Read more...]

If SVCD can be viewed as format that seeks to combine the advantages of DVD quality with the cheapness of writable CD media, then miniDVD can be viewed in a similar light. The miniDVD format goes the whole hog though - it is DVD on CD … [Read more...]

With over 20 million households owning VCD payers by the late 1990s, it is unsurprising that China was instrumental in the development of a successor to the VCD format. The first of three independent efforts to bring the next-generation VCD … [Read more...]

The VideoCD format was created to satisfy the demands of both the entertainment and information publishing worlds. The aim was to provide a format capable of delivering their content on an interactive medium that was inexpensive to replicate, … [Read more...]

ActiveMovie, a Microsoft API that was announced in March 1996, is receiving wide support in the computer industry as "the next generation of cross-platform digital video technology for the desktop and the Internet", according to a Microsoft … [Read more...]

AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) is Microsoft's generic format for digital video in Windows, provided via its MCI (Media Control Interface). AVI allows for a number of compression methods, in real-time, non-real-time, and with … [Read more...]

Recognizing the drawback of requiring a costly playback adapter, Apple developed a video format that can be played without special add-on hardware. The result, QuickTime, represents a major milestone for digital video. It provides a multimedia … [Read more...]

There were a number of other popular codes, all supported by Microsoft's VfW, still in use by the late 1990s: Microsoft Video 1: Fast compression but low ratios. Good for full-motion, moderate-quality video at resolutions up to about … [Read more...]

Shortly after the introduction of Apple QuickTime, Intel responded with its Indeo Video Interactive (IVI or Indeo 4.0) codec. This format allows for scaleable software-only video playback. IVI can compress video symmetrically (in real time, … [Read more...]

Video compression is the art of throwing as much data away as possible without it showing. Video compression methods tend to be lossy - that is, what comes out after decoding isn't identical to what was originally encoded. By cutting … [Read more...]