- A video codec is an electronic circuit or software that compresses or decompresses digital video.
- It converts raw (uncompressed) digital video to a compressed format or vice-versa.
- In the context of video compression, "codec" is a concatenation of "encoder" and "decoder"—a device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.
- The compressed data format usually conforms to a standard video compression specification.
- The compression is typically lossy, meaning that the compressed video lacks some information present in the original video.
Commonly used video codecs :
- H.265/MPEG-H HEVC codecs
- H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codecs
- H.263/MPEG-4 Part 2 codecs
- H.262/MPEG-2 codecs
- Microsoft codecs
- Google (On2) codecs