Today I was faced with a situation where I had to help someone troubleshoot some video shenanigan, and had to teach a little bit about video codecs, however, after thinking through it, I found that my “would be” answer was going to be too technical to be of any use in the situation so I thought maybe I can talk a bit about codecs here instead.

Basically, everyone’s heard of MOV, WMV, MP4, M4V etc etc right? Let me clarify this myth and say that these are NOT codecs. They are “Containers” that store all the video and audio information.

So what is a codec? A codec is an algorithm that compresses your raw video and audio information. For example, H264/AVC, is a very popular codec. AVC is a variant of H264, they’re technically almost the same thing. MPEG2, is made popular because it’s the codec used for DVDs. MPEG1 is the codec used for VCDs. So, technically you can use the same codecs for different containers. So, you can actually have the same video file compressed by H264 but placed in a different container, like WMV or MOV. The different containers are just different companies trying to be funny to make your life difficult so you will only use their “propriety” format. Okay, it’s not that simple, but this is sort of the gist of it.

Next, there’s a million and one codecs out there, and they all work differently, but the end goal in mind is all the same; to EFFICIENTLY reduce file size without compromising too much on quality.

Okay, for those who are still confused, let me try to explain this with an example – Imagine you want to package some potato chips, and laid out before you, you have Lays, Pringles, Calbee and Ruffles. Lays, Ruffles and Calbee all have similar types of packaging, which is basically an airtight plastic bag that usually contains a lot more air than chips. (codec is weak here because it’s not efficient) Pringles, on the other hand, uses a tube container to efficiently package a large quantity (large raw video) of chips into a small tube, hence, Pringle’s “Codec” is very efficient. It manages to squeeze a lot of chips (information) into a small package (small file size).

Now I’m hungry.

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