The Animation codec is a fast and lossless (if encoded at 100% quality) Quicktime video codec created by Apple Computer to enable playback of RGB video in real time without expensive hardware. It supports color depths from 1 to 32 bits, and is one of the few video codecs that supports an alpha channel. The Animation codec uses run-length encoding for compression, and as such works well for traditional 2-D animation where there are large areas of constant color, or have little change of pixels frame to frame (like screencast). For complex 3D rendered scenes or digitized film of real-world footage, it barely compresses at all and can also add visible noise at lower than 100% quality levels. It is also known by the acronym qtrle. It was also declared the "winner" of a recent screencast codec shootout[1]. It is available in the FFMpeg codec suite.