You might not have heard the term âcodecâ before, but your business likely uses them. A codec is a program or device. It can compress data so you can transit it faster and easier from one place to another. You can also use it to decompress any data that you receive from an outside source.
We will talk about this concept in more detail in the following article. When we finish, you will understand the notion when someone mentions this term.
Why Does Your Company Use Codecs?
Letâs imagine you own or operate a company, and youâre making promotional videos for a new service or product. You will likely have to do this at some point. If you own a larger company that offers many products or services, you might have to make many videos during a given year.
The codec you use reveals your videoâs details. For example, you might have a video you shoot that you want to post on your companyâs website, or else you might feature it on YouTube or elsewhere.
Whenever you get ready to post that video, the platform you use will need to read it. That means it briefly examines your videoâs data to ensure it can display it in the best way possible.
If you didnât use a codec to compress the videoâs raw data, such as pixel length and width, color info per pixel, frames per second, etc., that videoâs data would overwhelm the platform. Itâs simply too much information for any platform to handle, except perhaps for highly specialized ones that you likely wouldnât want to use.
Computer scientists came up with the codec idea years ago to quickly compress a fileâs data so you can easily present it on a common platform. Codec means compressor-decompressor.
Do Only Videos Have Codecs?
Videos have codecs, but so do other files. With video, if you are talking about its codec, you would express that as VP8, Cinepak, MPEG-2, and others.
You will also quickly discover that images have codecs. You might express one as PNG, GIF, or JPEG. Even audio files have codec elements. You would describe an audio fileâs codec as AAC, MP3, and others.
How Do You Use a Codec?
If you click on a video to watch it, youâre using a codec to unpack that video. The brief buffering process you see involves the player youâre using reading the codec to see if it can process it.
You can use a codec to play a video file, but you can also use it to create one. If youâre a little more tech-savvy, you can grasp how to do this. Itâs not as difficult as you may think if you exercise patience and are willing to learn.
You can use a videoâs codec, or one for an image or audio file, to send that media from one place to another. For example, if you send someone a movie MP3 as an email attachment so they can watch it on their laptop or desktop, youâre using a codec, even if you donât realize it.
How Else Can You Use One?
Most people use codecs without ever thinking about it. If you want to learn more about them, though, youâll soon find out that you can edit video files, or visual or auditory ones, by changing the codecâs essential elements.
For example, maybe you want to play a video, but itâs in MPEG-2 mode, and your deviceâs player wonât play it unless you convert it to VP8 or Cinepak. You can put the file through the necessary transition process and then watch it without any issues.
If youâre making promotional videos, or audio files or images, for that matter, you want to make sure you have them in the correct codec form before you let the public access them. If you use the wrong format and the public canât see or hear them, that will frustrate them.
Youâve likely experienced this at some point. Maybe you went to a companyâs website, and you saw a broken image on the landing page or one of the product pages. That means something corrupted the file.
This happens in various ways, but maybe the unpacking process on the file transferâs back end caused it. If so, you need to fix the issue, or no one can access that fileâs content.
Once you realize this, itâs easy to see why you need to understand some codec basics as a business owner.
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