Gadgetory

from Wikipedia the word codec is a portmanteau of coder decoder or compressor decompressor and it's a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream but let's put that in real people terms that the average computer user can understand shall we first what we typically mean by digital data stream is audio or video content that is stored in a format that is easily read by computers or other electronic devices that means digital files made up of zeros and ones rather than analog media like vinyl records next we need to disambiguate the term codec because depending on whether we're referring to a hardware chip or a piece of software it can actually have fairly different meanings let's start with code or decoder hardware when the term is used this way it usually refers to audio gear rather than video and a codec contains both a DAC and an ADC within one package allowing it to convert sound to a digital file and then allowing it to interpret digital files and turn those back into sound with as much fidelity as possible some losses occur during both of these conversions however which leads us well into the more widespread use of the term codec software codecs these are computer programs that take the original source video or audio data and pack it up in a specific format that adheres to a documented standard that will allow it to be easily interpreted by other devices or pieces of software that are capable of utilizing the same codec but why would you want to do that you might ask I was trying to play a movie on my computer and it said I didn't have the codec installed it was a pain in the patoot why can't everything just be sent in its original form or at the very least why can't everything use the same codec great question in a perfect world we would never compress or convert anything because aside from the inconvenience and I alluded to this before most codecs are what is known as lossy which means that we're losing some of the fidelity of the video or audio recording when we convert to them unfortunately though in the real world the logistics of uncompressed media files are a nightmare a 10-minute HD video that you download from u2 might be a couple hundred megabytes whereas a 12 bit raw file the same length and resolution can be easily over 60 gigs try streaming that kind of data over your internet connection lossless codecs are a way around this degradation of quality but compared to lossy codecs their file sizes are still very large and or they can be very processor intensive to encode and decode so the most common solution is to use a lossy codec at high bitrate that is more data per second in the stream if you want high quality playback without files that are so large you can't store them or easily send them anywhere but there's no one right answer some codecs are best for high quality while others maintain better playback on unreliable connections while others still are designed to keep latency or delay very very low and that is why we need a wide variety of audio and video codecs that are optimized for different uses the last thing I'll touch on is containers an example is MKV or a VI these are basically just easily recognizable wrappers that contain a number of media streams for example video audio navigation menu and some subtitle files now many people equate containers with codecs because there are file types like mp3 or JPEG that act as a container but can only contain a single file type so that's where the confusion comes from regular containers by contrast can contain media files that utilize a wide variety of different codecs and if all of this is still pretty confusing and you just wanted an answer to like how to play your media files don't worry there's an easy fix you can download VLC media player which contains most of the codecs you'll need on a daily basis or if you don't like VLC you can install CCCP codec pack which installs media player classic and a wide variety of different codecs on your system so you basically won't have to think about this anymore alright so now with all this talk about videos maybe you'd like to enjoy some sweet enlightened videos except don't wait pesky Gio restrictions and blackout zones might prevent you from actually being able to enjoy online services like us Netflix and Pandora because you happen to live in a region that doesn't allow those services good thing hotspot Shield who if you didn't pick up on it by now is the sponsor of this video thanks guys is such a fast easy and inexpensive way to set up a VPN that allows you to fake your location and get access to international content very very easily you can get a free trial of their elite service by checking out the link in the video description and you can save 20% if you decide to sign up for a subscription by using offer code Linus so check that out today thank you guys for watching don't forget to like and share this video if you liked it dislike it if you just 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