Video Codec Collection

The 3ivx D4 4.5 Video Core, a high power video compression technology generates video that is fully compliant with MPEG-4 Simple or Advanced Simple Profile. The Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) defines ISO standardized video compression specifications for the coding of audio-visual information (movies, video clips, music, etc.). The 3ivx D4 4.5 Video Core is a COder/DECoder (referred to as a codec) that allows content creators to deliver fully compliant MPEG-4 files. The 3ivx D4 4.5 Core has been designed for performance (speed), image quality, interoperability and portability.

I have used this codec under OSX with no issues what so ever, however I have no personal experience with it under Linux. [more]

DivX is a lot of things. First and foremost, DivX is a patent-pending MPEG-4 digital video technology created by DivXNetworks, Inc. Videos encoded with DivX technology are among the highest quality digital videos available anywhere (and with a relatively small file size to boot).

Be warned this codec may be free for personal use, but its closed source, binary only, and you are likely better off using XviD or ffmpeg, both of which are much faster, and also open source. [more]

Alternative open source DivX Codec. Can play MS-MPEG4v1, MS-MPEG4v2, DivX 3.11 alpha, DivX 4 (aka OpenDivX), DivX 5, 3ivx (Delta 4 and later) and XVID. Based on ffmpeg libavcodec 0.4.6 [more]

LZO is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C. It offers pretty fast compression and very fast decompression. Decompression requires no memory. In addition there are slower compression levels achieving a quite competitive compression ratio while still decompressing at this very high speed.

While not really a video codec, its used by transcode to compress video, so is not totally out of place here. If you are looking for other data compression tools, libraries etc, my downloads section now has a collection dedicated to nothing but compression. [more]

libavcodec is part of the ffmpeg project and contains some 40+ video codecs, and is about as fast as it gets with MPEG4 encoding, being my codec of choice, and yes I built from source under Linux and OSX, both without any problems. For a full list of its codecs, have a look at the online documentation. Now if all this is not good enough, its also available under OSX, BSD and more or less every known platform, see the project page on sourceforge for more on that one. [more]

The Quasar DV codec (libdv) is a software codec for DV video, the encoding format used by most digital camcorders, typically those that support the IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. FireWire or i.Link) interface. Libdv was developed according to the official standards for DV video: IEC 61834 and SMPTE 314M. [more]

libfame is a video encoding library. It can currently encode MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 rectangular video, as well as MPEG-4 video with arbitrary shape. [more]

libmpeg2 is a free library for decoding mpeg-2 and mpeg-1 video streams. It now supports 4:2:2-profile decoding, robustness has been enhanced to the point that we don't know how to crash it anymore despite trying hard, it supports concatenated streams with different sizes, the color conversion routines are now in a reusable helper library, we have sparc VIS optimizations for the MC, and some start of a basic documentation directory too. [more]

Libmpeg3 supports advanced editing and manipulation of MPEG streams. MPEG is normally a last mile distribution format but with libmpeg3 you can edit it like a production format. Unless you have a need for MPEG editing and copying, you're better off using a consumer library like FFMPEG. Libmpeg3 is primarily a supporting library for Cinelerra. It supports all of the nonstandard operations Cinelerra needs. Libmpeg3 provides a uniform front end for a large number of the MPEG formats used in HDTV broadcasting. It decodes MPEG-1 Layer II Audio, MPEG-1 Layer III Audio, MPEG-2 Layer III Audio, MPEG-1 program streams, MPEG-2 program streams, MPEG-2 transport streams, AC3 Audio, MPEG-2 Video, MPEG-1 Video, IFO files and VOB files. [more]

The mjpeg programs are a set of tools that can do recording of videos and playback, simple cut-and-paste editing and the MPEG compression of audio and video under Linux. Recording is supported for the Zoran based cards like the Buz (Iomega), DC10 (MIRO, Pinnacle), Matrox Marvel cards and the LML33 (Linux Media Labs). See related pages to the right to find the right driver for your card. The recorded videos can be converted to MPEG streams. The software playback of MPEG streams works with almost every player and every OS. You can produce special forms of MPEG streams like VCD (Video CD) and SVCD for hardware playback. The tools can be used used to edit, playback and compress motion JPEG (MJPEG) AVI's captured using the xawtv package. The tools can be used to edit playback and compress MJPEG streams created and edited with broadcast 2000. N.b. the current mpeg2movie high bit-rate MPEG encoder is in large part derived from an obsolescent snapshot of the mjpegtools MPEG encoder. [more]

MP1E is a small MPEG1 encoder based on ffmpeg with a lot of optimizations for SSE, MMX, 3DNow!, etc. [more]

NuppelVideo is a simple low consuming and fast capture program for bttv-cards (BT8x8) it is based on the RTjpeg2.0 test3* programs from Justin Schoemann , who wrote the very fast and fine RTjpeg2.0 codec (improved by Joerg Walter and Wim Taymans). [more]

OpenQuicktime aims to be a portable library for handling Apples QuickTime popular media files on Unix-like environments. It is aim is to provide encoding, authoring and editing support as well as video playback. This library is based on an enhanced version of the Quicktime 4 Linux library. It features decoding and encoding QuickTime files, support for standard audio and video codecs (including MP3 audio) and a plug-in support so that non-open source codecs can be used with OpenQuicktime. [more]

New RealVideo 9 delivers superior video quality over any type of Internet connection - from narrowband to broadband.

I have zero experience with this codec under any operating system, so cannot really comment on how good, or otherwise it is. [more]

XviD is an ISO MPEG-4 compliant video codec. It's no product, it's an open source project which is developed and maintained by lots of people from all over the world.

I have used this codec from its early beta days, initially under Linux, and now under OSX, allways building from source. It may no longer be the fastest MPEG4 codec, but its still one of the most reliable, and gives video quality thats just plain stunning. [more]