Introduction

Why a codec?
Electronic artists who use computers to play video in live situations have to deal with the amount of drive space and hardware required to achieve proper results.

Realtime video performance demands are huge. A 2 second clip of uncompressed video (like on a VHS tape), takes up 53 megs of drive space and requires the computer to transfer 27 megabytes of data per second from the hard drive over the motherboard's bus to your video card in realtime. That's just one video playing back. Most computers are incapable of this without special hardware.

When you consider that VJ programs like Midivid commonly allow you to layer the playback of multiple videos at once to the screen with added realtime effects, your video transfer rate could easely pass the 100 megabytes per second mark. However, a regular Pentium 2 with a UDMA 33 drive will attain a physical transfer speed of around 5-6 meg/sec tops. Oops...

The solution is to reduce the video file size and transfer rate as much as possible by using what is called a Codec (CO = compressor / DEC = decompressor).

A codec is a special program your video editing software will use to compress your video clip by removing all the redundant data that it can. The same codec is used to decompress the file at playback time by programs like media player.

When the codec is installed in your system, It will appear alongside other codecs in the compressor options of the video editing program you are using prior to rendering your video.

At playback time the decompressor is automatically called up by the video player you are running; you don't have to go look for it before playing your video.

Performance
Using the Mideo codec you can typically reduce a 27 meg per second clip down to 1 meg per sec and maintain decent visual quality. A 2 second video clip 53 megs in size would be reduced to under 3 megs and play back much smoother than the original.

With this kind of compression, a VJ program running on the UDMA33 system we mentioned earlier could now play 3-4 videos simultaneously, when it originally couldn't even come close to playing one uncompressed clip.

The Mideo codec is typically up to 4 times as fast as the nearest competing codec when it comes to compression times and up to 50% more CPU efficient in playback. It also offers more configuration options than any other codec in it's class. It was designed with the VJ in mind.

The codec will work in any proper windows video program including VJ software. And it's freeware.

You can download it here.