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Video codecs are software algorithms that allow the users to compress and decompress video. Sasken Inc offers a comprehensive portfolio of video codec implementations that conform to the main standards in the industry.
H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), is a block-oriented and motion-compensated video codec that has been jointly developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). Joint Video Team (JVT) is the name of the joint group that has created the H.264 specification. H.264 has been widely adopted by the telecom, broadcast and digital media storage industries.
MPEG-4 was introduced in 1998 as a standard for video coding by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG). MPEG-4 includes many features of its predecessors MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, as well as improved coding efficiency, ability to encode mixed media data (video and audio) and error resilience capabilities.
Sasken Inc's MPEG-4 codec comes in two flavors:
MPEG-2 is a standard that describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission bandwidth.
MPEG-2 is widely used as the format of digital television signals that are broadcast by terrestrial (over-the-air), cable, and direct broadcast satellite TV systems. It also specifies the format of movies and other programs that are distributed on DVD and similar discs. As such, TV stations, TV receivers, DVD players, and other equipment are often designed to this standard. MPEG-2 was the second of several standards developed by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) and is an international standard (ISO/IEC 13818). Parts 1 and 2 of MPEG-2 were developed in a joint collaborative team with ITU-T, and they have a respective catalog number in the ITU-T Recommendation Series.
Windows Media Video (WMV) is a compressed video file format for several proprietary codecs developed by Microsoft. The original codec, known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. Through standardization from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), WMV has gained adoption for physical-delivery formats such as HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
A WMV file is in most circumstances encapsulated in the Advanced Systems Format (ASF) container format. The file extension .WMV typically describes ASF files that use Windows Media Video codecs. The audio codec used in conjunction with Windows Media Video is typically some version of Windows Media Audio, or in rarer cases, the deprecated Sipro ACELP.net audio codec. Microsoft recommends that ASF files containing non-Windows Media codecs use the generic .ASF file extension.
Although WMV is generally packed into the ASF container format, it can also be put into the AVI or Matroska container format. The resulting files claim the .AVI, or .MKV file extensions, respectively. WMV can be stored in an AVI file when using the WMV 9 Video Compression Manager (VCM) codec implementation. Another common way to store WMV in an AVI file is to use the VirtualDub encoder.
This container can optionally support digital rights management using a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and the SHA-1 hashing function. Microsoft's DRM technology is called Windows Media DRM.
MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding H.264