Open source codecs and containers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a listing of open-source multimedia codecs and container formats. That doesn't necessarily mean that further restrictions (such as software patents) don't exist for these codecs and formats, which is the case for many of them, like MP3. Note that codec is software, not a format — for example, video produced with the XviD and FFmpeg MPEG-4 codecs is MPEG-4 ASP video.

Contents 1 Containers 2 Video Codecs 3 Audio codecs 4 Text Codecs 5 See also

[edit] Containers

• Ogg - Created by the Xiph Foundation.
  • See also OGM, which is a fork of Ogg.
• Matroska - .mkv & .mka files.
• NUT - Developed by the MPlayer team.

[edit] Video Codecs

• x264 - H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10) implementation.
• XviD - MPEG-4 part 2 codec, compatible with DivX.
• FFmpeg codecs - codecs in the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project (FFV1, Snow, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 part 2, MSMPEG-4, H.264, WMV2, SVQ3, MJPEG, HuffYUV, Indeo and others).
• Tarkin - an experimental lossy video codec under development by the Xiph.org Foundation based on 3-D wavelet compression
• Lagarith - lossless video codec
• Theora - Based on VP3, part of the Ogg Project.
• Dirac - Wavelet based codec created by the BBC.
• Huffyuv - Lossless codec from BenRG.

[edit] Audio codecs

• FLAC - Lossless compression.
• iLBC - Low bitrate voice compression.
• LAME - Lossy compression (MP3 format).
• Musepack - Lossy compression; an attempt to replicate the MP3 format.
• Speex - Low bitrate compression, primarily voice.
• TTA - Lossles compression
• Vorbis - Lossy compression; developed by Xiph.org.
• WavPack - Hybrid lossy/lossless

See also Advanced Audio Coding for open-source implementations of the AAC codec.

[edit] Text Codecs

(generally used for subtitles/closed captioning)

• Writ.

[edit] See also

• Comparison of container formats
• Comparison of media players
• Free file format