What are audio and video codecs?
Codecs are software or hardware devices that digitally encode and decode (compress) an analog signal.
It will happen to you that at least once in your life you cannot play a video file like a movie or a piece of music and wonder what the reason for this obstacle is. The bug in the above cases is the program for watching movies and listening to music: it does not have the required codecs.
Audio and video codecs are key elements for the proper functioning of a computer system, even if they are not known to the public. Without a suitable codec, however, computers (or smartphones and video game consoles and even decoders that watch TV at home) would not be able to play music or display pictures from a film. Our ability to relax and watch a movie or listen to the music of our favorite actor or singer depends on the codecs.
What are audio and video codecs?
An acronym for encoder / decoder is a codec or software device that converts an analog signal such as the sound wave of a song into a digital data stream. This way, your computer or other computing device can easily play photos, videos and songs. Codecs are also used to reduce the size of audio and video files that result from analog-to-digital conversion. Without compression technology, digital files would be huge and difficult to manage from computers and smartphones.
Two compression techniques
There are two compression techniques: loss and loss. The first system is lossless and the second is lossless. Let’s take another example. Let’s say we want to insert analog video with lossy compression: we have a small file, but not exactly good audio and video quality. If we choose the second technique (no loss), the file is “heavier”, but has a higher audio and video resolution.
The best quality
Compression removes some of the elements that make up the video. Lossy compression codecs remove more data than lossless compression codecs. In recent years we have been working to optimize the quality of compression. For example, the new HEVC standard (High Efficiency Video Coding), also called H.265, offers a better ratio of quality to compression. In practice, unlike the old H.264 codec, you can compress more without sacrificing audio and video quality.
