Codec, codec, where is the codec?

When you download or otherwise receive digitized video it is most certainly compressed. In order to view it, you need to uncompress it or call on an application to uncompress it. These applications call upon various codecs, compressor/decompressors, that can uncompress the video according to the algorithms that were used to compress the video in the first place. Your operating system routinely comes with some of the leading codecs. You download codecs, sometimes not really consciously when you install some applications. These codecs become part of your system support components and can be used by other video that you may acquire from other sources. You might ask, what codecs on your system? The time when this question becomes of major interest is when you get some video and you get an accompanying error message saying that you cannot decompress the video. Now, one of our students very recently had a problem playing back several videos that we supplied that were encoded using the Indeo 5.1 codec. We told this student to verify that he had this codec.

Here is how to get a list of codecs on a Windows XP system. Go to Start, then select control panel, then system, then hardware, then device manager, sound, video and game controllers and finally you can get a list of codecs.

Our desktop system lists the following audio codecs: creative SB Live! Series (WDM) Creative SBLive! Gameport Legacy Audio Drivers Legacy Video Capture Devices Media Control Devices Unimodem Half-Duplex Audio Device

If I click on Video Compression Codecs, I get about 14 listed including Indeo video5.10 and Microsoft MPEG-4 Video Codec.

Now, since our Windows XP is a fairly old system, we did have this codec. But, it turns out that this student had recently purchased a new computer with a new version of Windows XP and it did not have this legacy codec. Microsoft is no longer distributing what is a widely used codec. We searched for this codec on the Internet and found that although Intel originally developed it, all rights had been transferred to Ligos Corporation that was willing to sell an entire package of codecs including Indeo and various versions for $14.00 with the newest version, 5.2. Well we did not need 5.2. Our videos needed 5.1. After searching the Web for a while, we found an Intel site where the student could download this codec for free.

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-...

If you want to delve more into codecs, be sure to read about and then get a codecs installation package for Windows Media Player 9 Series from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows...

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