One of the first questions we get from people who velearned a little bit about streaming media is, What codec should I use? They often ask thisquestion without thinking very much about the entire process, and not really understanding theplace of codecs in the production stream. Codecs are also rather mysterious and slightly scary.Some people say it means enCOde/DECode. Others say it means COmpress/DECompress. Even the word codec has a certain Klingon-dialect feel toit.

These perceptions are probably the fault of the vendors, who compete strenuously on thequality of these critical components of their streaming systems. They spend large amounts of moneyresearching or buying the rights to use these algorithms, which become massively hyped points ofdifferentiation. In other words, the competition sometimes boils down to Our codec is better thanhis codec. Codecs are also a way of tying a customer to a particular system. Once a producersettles on a vendor s proprietary codecs, it s hard to move to another vendor. The switching costsare just too big.

It s important to keep codecs in perspective. You re correct if you understand the centralimportance of codec choice. We ll discuss how to make that choice in this section. But, hopefully,you ve gathered from the rest of this book up to this point that codecs are only one piece of abigger puzzle. Don t get hung up on them.