Indeo
Encyclopedia
Indeo Video is a 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...

 developed by Intel in 1992. It was sold to Ligos Corporation in 2000. While its original version was related to Intel's DVI
Digital Video Interactive
Digital Video Interactive was the first multimedia desktop video standard for IBM-compatible personal computers, developed around 1984 by Section 17 of The David Sarnoff Research Center Labs then a division of RCA. When General Electric purchased RCA in 1986, GE considered the DSRC redundant...

 video stream format, a hardware-only codec for the compression of television-quality video onto compact disks, Indeo was distinguished by being one of the first codecs allowing full-speed video playback without using hardware acceleration.

Details

During the development of what became the P5
P5 (microarchitecture)
The original Pentium microprocessor was introduced on March 22, 1993. Its microarchitecture, deemed P5, was Intel's fifth-generation and first superscalar x86 microarchitecture. As a direct extension of the 80486 architecture, it included dual integer pipelines, a faster FPU, wider data bus,...

 Pentium microprocessor, the Intel Architecture Labs
Intel Architecture Labs
Intel Architecture Labs, also known as IAL, was the personal computer system research and development arm of Intel Corporation during the 1990s...

 implemented one of the first, and at the time highest-quality, software-only video codecs, which was marketed as "Indeo Video". At its public introduction, it was the only video codec supported in both the Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 (Video for Windows
Video for Windows
Video for Windows was a multimedia framework developed by Microsoft that allowed Microsoft Windows to play digital video.-Overview:...

) and 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...

's QuickTime
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...

 software environments, as well as by IBM's software systems of the day.

The original Indeo codec was highly asymmetrical, meaning that it took much more computation to encode a video stream than to decode it. Intel's ProShare video conferencing system took advantage of this, using hardware acceleration to encode the stream (and thus requiring an add-in card), but allowing the stream to be displayed on any personal computer.

Intel produced several different versions of the codec between 1993 and 2000, when it was sold to Ligos, based on very different underlying mathematics and having different features. Indeo Video Interactive, a wavelet-based codec that included novel features such as chroma-keyed
Chroma key
Chroma key compositing is a technique for compositing two images together. A color range in the top layer is made transparent, revealing another image behind. The chroma keying technique is commonly used in video production and post-production...

 transparency and hot spot support, was aimed at video game developers.

Though Indeo saw significant usage in the mid-1990s, it remained proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

. Intel slowed development and stopped active marketing, and it was quickly surpassed in popularity by the rise of MPEG codecs and others, as processors became more powerful and its optimization for Intel's chips less important. Indeo still saw some use in video game cutscene
Cutscene
A cutscene is a sequence in a video game over which the player has no or only limited control, breaking up the gameplay and used to advance the plot, strengthen the main character's development, introduces enemy characters, and provide background information, atmosphere, dialogue, and clues...

 videos.

Official Indeo 5 decoders exist for Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, Mac OS Classic
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

, BeOS R5
BeOS R5
BeOS R5 is the final version of BeOS from Be Inc.. It was released in March 2000, and came in two varieties: Professional and Personal.R5 was the 4th major release of BeOS for a public audience, and the 6th since it left developer-only stages. It changed only slightly from the previous release,...

 and the XAnim player on Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

. Versions 2, 3 and 5 have reverse-engineered decoders in 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...

. Indeo version 3 (IV31 and IV32), 4 (IV41) and 5 (IV50) are supported by MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...

 and XAnim. Version 5.11 is freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

and may be used on all 32-bit versions of Windows prior to Vista. Version 5.2 has been created for XP and is available to buy from the official website for use only with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. This includes support for Indeo Video 4.5 and Indeo Audio 2.5 codecs but the version 3.2 video codec has been removed since the original release of Indeo XP for Windows. Although Indeo video is not officially supported by Windows Vista and Windows 7, simply entering the following into the command prompt might enable the playback of Indeo encoded video:
regsvr32 ir50_32.dll

Security advisory

The Indeo codec contains several security vulnerabilities and one should not play Indeo videos from untrusted sources. On fully patched systems the Indeo codec is disabled in most circumstances; there are no plans to fix the vulnerabilities.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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