From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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What is a codec?

What is a codec?

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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What is a codec?

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- [Instructor] CoDec is a shortening of the words Compressor and Decompressor. It sounds technical, and the implementation of codecs can be extremely complex, but it's not that difficult to understand the way they work, if you view them as languages. A good codec is one that stores video or sound in a small file, while retaining a lot of the original picture quality. The more you compress a media file, and we literally mean making it a smaller file to store, usually, the more the quality degrades. More on this in the lesson on video compression. For you to store information in a particular codec, you need to install it, and codecs work a little like fonts. You can install them easily, just as you would software. And once they're installed, any compatible software can use them. For cameras, this process usually happens in the factory. Once the media has been compressed, usually into a smaller file, it's a file like any other, and can be transferred more quickly because it's usually…

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