
Standardization | It has a great influence on the spread of codecs

For video playback, the same codec as the sender-encoded “video data codec” and “audio data codec” must be included in the display environment on the receiver side and decoded.

Therefore, as a second point of view of codec selection, it is necessary to be aware of the propagation situation.
Codecs are found in many places. In terms of devices, terminals, browsers, personal computer operating systems, etc., “standardization” has a great influence on the support of each codec from each manufacturer.
Standardization can be broadly classified into
1) internal standards (standards independently established by companies)
2) industry standards (independently established by the industry. There are merits in terms of compatibility, etc.)
3) National standards (established by the national government based on the law. JIS, etc.)
4) Regional standards (standards that span multiple countries)
5) International standards (global standards)
There is, and the influence increases in the order of 1) → 5). Since an international standard is recognized as suitable for general use around the world, it will be adopted by many manufacturers and developers and will be widely used. The number of cases where the codec is pre-installed in browsers, players, playback terminals, etc. will increase, and if the codec installation is no longer necessary, the threshold for viewing videos of the recipient will be lowered considerably. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the standardization trend as an important point of view of codec selection.
There are “ISO / IEC JCT1” that started in the storage field and “ITU-T” that started in the communication field as the organizations that established the international standard for compression encoding of video and audio data. ISO / IEC is formulating the MPEG series, ITU-T is formulating the international standard for the H.26X series, and both organizations jointly formulate H.262 / MPEG-2 and H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC (Fig. 1 ).
[Fig. 1] Standardization flow of “MPEG” and “H.26X” series
] Standardization flow chart for each series of “MPEG” and “H.26X”
If you want to widely reach an indeterminate number of people, it is important to select a codec that is popular to some extent, and it is essential to be aware of “standardization” at that time. However, it is not always good to keep up with the latest, and even if it becomes an international standard, it will take some time before it becomes mainstream, so be careful.



