Digital video has come a long way since the early 2000s. We’ve seen picture quality improve leaps and bounds, in tandem with the introduction of new display technologies like OLED. As consumers too, we have higher expectations than ever before, both at home and on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. Codecs enable all of this, compressing large swathes of raw information into a video file that’s much more manageable for storage, broadcast, and distribution.
Over the years, major industry players like Google, Intel, and Apple have been interested in new ways to compress and package video. You may have heard of YouTube adopting the new AV1 standard, for example, and newer iPhone models targeting professional videographers with Apple’s ProRes codec. Indeed, there are at least a handful of different standards currently in use, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
