What Is A Codec
What Is A Codec
A (COder-DECoder) is Hardware or software that converts analog sound, speech or video to digital code and vice versa (analog to digital-- digital to analog). Codecs must faithfully reproduce the original signal, but they must also compress the binary code to the smallest number of bits possible in order to transmit faster.
As network bandwidth increases, so does the demand for more audio and video, so compression is always an issue.
Codecs can be software or hardware. Software codecs are installed into audio and video editing programs as well as media players that download audio and video over the Web. Software codecs rely entirely on the PC for processing.
Hardware codecs are specialized chips built into digital telephones and videoconferencing stations to maximize performance. Although hardware codecs are faster than software routines, faster desktop machines are increasingly enabling software codecs to perform quite adequately.
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