A codec, which may alternately stand for “Coder-Decoder” or “Compressor/Decompressor”, is a program that encodes and decodes data. Typically this refers to multimedia codecs such as XviD that can encode compressed MPEG-4 video files and play them back again.
Codecs are typically divided into two categories: lossy and lossless. Lossy codecs, like Theora are codes whose encoding process strips data deemed unnecessary in favor of small file size. Lossless codecs, like FLAC on the other hand rely on algorithmic data compression to compress media without losing a byte of media quality.
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Media_Player_Classic