Sorenson codec

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The Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec, Sorenson Video Quantizer or SVQ) is a digital video codec devised by the company Sorenson Media and used by Apple's QuickTime and, in the newest version of Macromedia Flash, a special version called Sorenson Spark.

The Sorenson codec first appeared in QuickTime 3. With QuickTime 4 it was widely used for the first time at the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999.

The specifications of the codec were not public, and for a long time the only way to play back Sorenson video was to use Apple's QuickTime player, or the MPlayer for Unix/Linux, which in turn piggy-backed Microsoft Windows DLL-files extracted from Apple's player.

According to an anonymous developer¹ of FFmpeg, reverse engineering of the SVQ3 codec revealed it as a tweaked version of H.264. The same developer also added support for this codec to FFmpeg, making native playback on all platforms supported by FFmpeg possible.

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