The Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec 3 or SVQ3) is a digital video codec devised by the company Sorenson Media and used by Apple's QuickTime and the newest version of Macromedia Flash, a special version called Sorenson Spark.

The Sorenson codec first appeared in QuickTime 4, which 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.

Analysis and reimplementation by an anonymous FFmpeg developer revealed that the Sorenson codec was a tweaked variant of the H.264 standard. This codec is supported in FFmpeg's libavcodec library since version 0.4.7, released August 24, 2003.

External link

• http://www.sorenson.com/