Saturday, May 28, 2005

About a year ago, Microsoft made great strides in legitimizing its technology for broadcasting by getting its Windows Media 9 video codec (now grandly titled Video Codec One, or VC-1) accepted by the industry's standards body SMPTE.

And both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray groups, representing the two competing High-Definition DVD hardware formats, have agreed to support Microsoft's codec as well as the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding standard in their new hi-def players.

This presents an interesting question. The Windows VC-1 and MPEG AVC camps are fighting over which is the "best hi-def codec". But with the future media players supporting both codecs, does it matter which one content producers choose? I think the software doesn't matter anymore.

Modern video codecs are also very similar to each other, and use similar mathematical techniques. They all break the picture into a lot of squares, and then use fancy mathematics (like those used in JPEG pictures) to represent these small squares with the smallest amount of bits.

They are all roughly comparable in quality, and the the VC-1 vs. MPEG AVC battle is a technical stalemate; the differentiating features have much more to do with implementations, price, and of course politics.