codec, a standard used for compressing and decompressing digital media, especially audio and video, which have traditionally consumed significant bandwidth. Codecs are used to store files on disk, as well as to transmit media (either as discrete files or as a stream) over computer networks. By rapidly compressing and decompressing this data, the required bandwidth is reduced, resulting in an increase of interactive and multimedia content being accessed and transmitted over networks. Codecs remain of central importance to the success of multimedia applications on the Internet, ranging from webcasting to teleconferencing.
With the rise and fall of the music-trading site Napster, the term MP3 entered common parlance to become one of the most widely recognized codecs. By eliminating sounds not normally heard by the human ear, MP3 (an abbreviation of MPEG-1 Audio Level-3) reduces music files to less than one-tenth of the space that they would normally consume on an audio CD. It allows music to be quickly sent over the Internet, and it also helped bring questions of copyright on the Internet to a head.
Just as some audio codecs are better at encoding human speech while others are better at encoding instrumental music, different types of video are sometimes better encoded in different formats. The processing power required to compress and decompress data and the flexibility of the compression level also contribute to the effectiveness of a codec.
There are a large number of codecs, both proprietary and open-source. In the former category are dozens of video, audio, and other codecs, including special-use and legacy codecs that are used by digital cameras, non-linear video editors, video teleconferencing, and virtual-reality systems, as well as in music production. Free, open-source alternatives have also emerged.
Generally, the most efficient codecs also require significant processing power. Distributing multimedia always necessitates a balance of processing power and bandwidth. Given that processing power has continued to grow exponentially while bandwidth bottlenecks remain in many places, the development of more effective codecs has been central to the growth of multimedia on the Internet.