The Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec 3 or SVQ3) is a digital video codec devised by the company Sorenson Media and used by Apple's QuickTime and the newest version of Macromedia Flash, a special version called Sorenson Spark. Digital video is a type of video recording system that works by using a digital, rather than analog, representation of the video signal. ... Codec is a portmanteau of either Compressor-Decompressor or Coder-Decoder, which describes a device or program capable of performing transformations on a data stream or signal. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... QuickTime 7 icon QuickTime is a multimedia technology developed by Apple Computer, capable of handling various formats of digital video, sound, text, animation, music, and immersive virtual reality panoramic images. ... Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Macromedia Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both a multimedia authoring program and the Macromedia Flash Player, written and distributed by Macromedia (recently targeted for acquisition by Adobe Systems), that utilizes vector and raster graphics, a native scripting language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of video...

The Sorenson codec first appeared in QuickTime 4, which was widely used for the first time at the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999. Film poster for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is a 1999 film by George Lucas starring Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, and Jake Lloyd. ... 11 March is the 70th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (71st in Leap year). ... 1999 is a common year starting on Friday of the Common Era, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ...

The specifications of the codec were not public, and for a long time the only way to play back Sorenson video was to use Apple's QuickTime player, or the MPlayer for Unix/Linux, which in turn piggy-backed Microsoft Windows DLL-files extracted from Apple's player. Apple Computer, Inc. ... QuickTime 7 icon QuickTime is a multimedia technology developed by Apple Computer, capable of handling various formats of digital video, sound, text, animation, music, and immersive virtual reality panoramic images. ... MPlayer is a free media player with support for more multimedia formats than any other media player. ... Something that is piggy-backed is something that is riding on the back of something else. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ... DLL is an abbreviation which can commonly mean: Data link layer, a layer in the OSI network architecture model Dynamically Linked Library, a Microsoft Windows binary application library file format (see the Dynamic linking section of the Library (computer science) article) Doubly Linked List, a data structure in computer programming...

According to an anonymous developer¹ of FFmpeg, reverse engineering of the SVQ3 codec revealed it as a tweaked version of H.264. FFmpeg is a set of open source computer programs that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. ... Reverse engineering (RE) is the process of taking something (a device, an electrical component, a software program, etc. ... H.264 is a high compression digital video codec standard written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). ...

Reference

• 1 Deconstructing H.264/AVC on DrunkenBlog, July 28, 2004.

External link

• http://www.sorenson.com/