The Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec, Sorenson Video Quantizer or SVQ) is a digital videocodec devised by the company Sorenson Media. It is used in Apple's QuickTime and in Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash).
The Sorenson Video codec first appeared with the release of QuickTime 3 on March 30, 1998. With QuickTime 4, it was given wide exposure for the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999. Sorenson Video 2 was released in March 1999; however, it mainly included minor improvements and optimizations to the Developer Edition of the encoder, as movies encoded with it were backwards compatible with the Sorenson Video decoder. An improved Sorenson Video 3 codec debuted with the release of QuickTime 5.0.2 on July 1, 2001. As Apple began to move away from proprietary codecs with its embrace of MPEG-4, Sorenson Media next licensed the newest version of the codec to Macromedia as Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263), released with Macromedia Flash 6/MX on March 4, 2002.[1]
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-backedMicrosoft WindowsDLL-files extracted from Apple's player.
According to an anonymous developer[2] of FFmpeg, reverse engineering of the SVQ3 codec revealed it as a tweaked version of H.264. The same developer also added support for this codec to FFmpeg, making native playback possible on all platforms supported by FFmpeg.
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