Codecs & Compression
Codec
The specific algorithm used to compress and decompress video or audio, such as H.264, H.265, or AV1.
A codec defines the rules for shrinking raw video into a manageable file size and reconstructing it for playback. Different codecs offer different trade-offs between compression efficiency, licensing cost, and how broadly devices support decoding them in hardware. Codec is often confused with container format, which is a separate concept describing how compressed data is packaged into a file.