Tedium - The Codecs of Streams Past 📹

2. Cinepak

Era: Early ’90s

Most common file extension: Often wrapped in .AVI or .MOV files, but also in .CPK

If you watched full motion video on a CD-ROM before, say, 1995, the way you did so was probably thanks to the Cinepak codec, which had the tough task of trying to compress video and audio into something small enough to run off a CD-ROM in real time—which Cinepak, developed by the company SuperMac Technology, excelled at.

There were problems, however. The resolution topped out at 320x240—which meant that it was blocky in fullscreen mode—and worse, it was time-consuming to encode, as it did not initially use dedicated hardware. As InfoWorld recalled in 1993:

But the time SuperMac saved on the playback side added greatly to the amount of time it took a content developer to compress a Cinepak file, [SuperMac Director of Business Development Daniel] Wald added. One second of video would take approximately 3 minutes to compress, he explained.

The Cinepak codec, despite its limitations and challenges for developers, was widespread in certain contexts. For example, many Sega CD-ROM based games, both for the Genesis and Saturn, utilized Cinepak for video compression (as highlighted in the video above), though a successor technology, TrueMotion, eventually appeared on the Saturn.

(via AppleInsider)

5. The version of Apple’s QuickTime format that used the Sorenson video codec

Era: Late ’90s

Most common file extension: Wrapped in .MOV

It may be hard to square in the modern day, but there was once a time when video trailers were a huge deal online, in part because of their ability to give viewers the taste of an experience.

Nobody knew this better, surprisingly, than Apple. The company, building out its digital video bonafides in the late ’90s, became known as the place to get high-quality film trailers thanks to a little film called Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which blew up the internet in early 1999 when Apple put a 480x216 trailer for the film on its site. That doesn’t sound like a lot today, but it was massive compared to what you could get from platforms like Windows Media Player and RealPlayer.

While the internet technology firm Akamai was credited for making the download portion of the video work, Apple’s collaborations with a firm called Sorenson, which specializes in video codecs, were the secret sauce to get such a high-quality video in a relatively small size. While Apple only emphasized the Sorenson codec for a few years before favoring more industry-standard technology like MPEG-4, the codec’s exclusivity came in handy when Apple started putting high-quality trailers on its website. Windows computers couldn’t play them—unless users downloaded QuickTime.

While QuickTime’s legacy remains in MacOS today thanks to the widely used QuickTime Player, the underlying technology that initially enabled QuickTime has been replaced and de-emphasized by Apple, with the company retiring the pro and Windows versions of the software as it moved away from 32-bit applications and replacing its feature set with the modernized AVFoundation.

YouTube made Flash video famous. (via Web Design Museum)

8. Flash video format

Era: 2000s

Most common file extension: .FLV, .F4V

This format, because of the nature of its integration with Flash, became surprisingly pivotal to the modern internet, even if we don’t actually use it today.

Flash gained video support with 2002’s version 6, but then supported a separately named FLV format launched with version 7, released in 2003. In 2005, two important things happened: One, Adobe bought Macromedia, in large part because of the potential of Flash; and two, a little site called YouTube launched.

YouTube made it clear that streaming video was a killer use case for Flash, despite it not technically being designed for the approach. Nonetheless, the popularity of Flash as a video player use case would prove short-lived as a result of the release of HTML5—and Apple’s famous refusal to support Flash on iOS.

In many ways, despite its obsolescence—Adobe deprecated the format at the same time it killed off Flash—it’s likely the most important format on here, just because of what it enabled.

(Fun fact: After Apple dropped the Sorenson codec, its successor, Sorenson Spark, found a home within Flash, though it was eventually removed there as well.)

Video is an interesting beast, in part because of how specific use cases can help popularize certain formats.

For example, one could make the case that the popularity of torrent sites likely made the proprietary DivX codec (not to be confused with the proprietary DIVX format) and the open-source XviD codec popular with general consumers, as they were commonly used to rip video from DVDs and other similar formats during the early 2000s.

Likewise, Flash video fits into the same category because it could leverage an existing Trojan horse—the fact that everyone with a desktop computer likely already had a Flash plug-in—to deliver streaming video to their machines. I don’t think Flash video had its brief moment in the sun because it was the best option. It was simply the most convenient, and when that was no longer the case, it quickly was replaced.

In some ways, this evolution is a bit of a change from the approaches used during previous generations of video uptake, when standards helped to drive new approaches. But there was a period during the early 2000s when it seemed like, despite all the technical work being done to shape the way we used video, it was the needs of the consumer that eventually led the way.

Nowadays, we take for granted the codecs and video formats we use, to the point where we don’t even think about them. It’s actually kind of amazing, as end users, that we don’t have to. They just work. That’s the power of standardization for ya.

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