The landscape of video formats and codecs is more complex than its audio sibling. This is due to the fact that video itself is more complex than audio. Videos usually contain visual data and audio. A common approach separates the visual information from the acoustic information. This allows using the normal audio codecs for the audio data and dedicated visual codecs for the video data.
Lossless video codecs are commonly used for video capturing and editing. For the use as Internet content, the file size is usually too big.
Huffyuv: Huffyuv (or HuffYUV) is a very fast, lossless Win32 video codec published under the terms of the GPL as free software.
Lagarith: A more up-to-date fork of the Huffyuv-codec is available as Lagarith.
This type of codec is very widespread. The compression ratio is very good and the encoding can be done very fast. For most of these codecs, there is encoding and decoding software available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The different types of codecs are:
DivX Pro Codec: A proprietary MPEG-4 ASP codec made by DivX Inc.
Xvid: Free/open source implementation of MPEG-4 ASP, originally based on the OpenDivX project.
FFmpeg MPEG-4: Included in the open source
libavcodeccodec library, which is used by default for decoding and/or encoding in many open source video players, frameworks, editors, and encoding tools such as MPlayer, VLC, ffdshow, or GStreamer. Compatible with other standards of MPEG-4 codecs such as Xvid or DivX Pro Codec.3ivx: A commercial MPEG-4 codec created by 3ivx Technologies.
An implementation of the H.264 codec was meant to be the Internet codec. There have been discussions about adding it to the HTML5 specification. Unfortunately, patents protect it and the browser manufacturers are not able to or are not willing to pay the patent fees. For this reason, probably no codec will be specified together with HTML5 and every browser may choose its own video format and codec.
The H.264 codec has a lot of use cases:
HDTV: H.264 is one of the compulsory encodings of the HD DVD and Blue-ray disc standards.
Portable video: The competing mobile television standards DVB-H and DMB use H.264 for the video encoding for mobile clients such as phones and PDAs. The fifth generation of the iPod and the Apple iPhone can play H.264 videos.
Multimedia: Apple ships its multimedia framework, QuickTime, with the H.264 codec since version 7.
Videoconferences: Some videoconference systems (iChat) use the H.264 codec.
Video/digicams: Many digital cameras support the H.264 encoding for video recording.
There are different implementations of the codec:
x264: A GPL-licensed implementation of the H.264 encoding standard. x264 is only an encoder.
Nero Digital: Commercial MPEG-4 ASP and AVC codecs developed by Nero AG.
QuickTime H.264: H.264 implementation released by Apple.
DivX Pro Codec: An H.264 decoder and encoder were added in version 7.
The company from Redmond ships its own bundle of video codecs. There are different codecs for different purposes and different qualities. Some open source players (such as VLC) can decode these formats.
WMV (Windows Media Video): Microsoft's family of video codec designs including WMV 7, WMV 8, and WMV 9. It can do anything from low-resolution video for dial-up Internet users to HDTV. The latest generation of WMV is standardized by SMPTE as the VC-1 standard.
MS MPEG-4v3: A proprietary and not MPEG-4 compliant video codec created by Microsoft. It was released as a part of Windows Media Tools 4. A hacked version of Microsoft's MPEG-4v3 codec became known as DivX.