Animation codec
Encyclopedia
The Animation codec is a fast and lossless (if encoded at 100% quality) Quicktime
video codec
created by Apple Computer
to enable playback of RGB video in real time
without expensive hardware. It supports color depths from 1 to 32 bits, and is one of the few video codecs that supports an alpha channel. The Animation codec uses run-length encoding
for compression, and as such works well for traditional 2-D animation where there are large areas of constant color, or have little change of pixels frame to frame (like screencast). For complex 3D rendered scenes or digitized film of real-world footage, it barely compresses at all and can also add visible noise at lower than 100% quality levels. It is also known by the acronym qtrle.
It was also declared the "winner" of a recent screencast codec shootout. It is available in the FFMpeg
codec suite.
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
video codec
Video codec
A video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video. The compression usually employs lossy data compression. Historically, video was stored as an analog signal on magnetic tape...
created by Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
to enable playback of RGB video in real time
Real-time computing
In computer science, real-time computing , or reactive computing, is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"— e.g. operational deadlines from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within strict time constraints...
without expensive hardware. It supports color depths from 1 to 32 bits, and is one of the few video codecs that supports an alpha channel. The Animation codec uses run-length encoding
Run-length encoding
Run-length encoding is a very simple form of data compression in which runs of data are stored as a single data value and count, rather than as the original run...
for compression, and as such works well for traditional 2-D animation where there are large areas of constant color, or have little change of pixels frame to frame (like screencast). For complex 3D rendered scenes or digitized film of real-world footage, it barely compresses at all and can also add visible noise at lower than 100% quality levels. It is also known by the acronym qtrle.
It was also declared the "winner" of a recent screencast codec shootout. It is available in the FFMpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
codec suite.