Windows Media Video Codec

 

General Information

 

 


Windows Media Video is, as the name implies, the primary codec for Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies.

The Windows Media Video codec is derived from MPEG-4. Several proprietary extensions allow it provide substantially better image quality at a given bitrate. At this point, Windows Media Video is one of the highest quality codecs available for streaming video.

 

Architectures Supported

 

Pros, Cons & Tips

 

 

Pros

  • Excellent web video quality
  • Provides better quality than MPEG-4 at a given bitrate

Cons

  • Requires fairly powerful system for high-bitrate playback
  • Not yet available on Macintosh

Ideal source material

video

Supported color formats

YUV 4:2:0

Compression time

Asymmetric

Temporal compression?

Yes

Special features

-

Encoder availability

Included in Windows Media Encoder v7 (for Windows), and Cleaner 5 (Mac and Windows)

Decoder availability

Included in Windows Media Player v7 (not yet available for Mac)

Algorithm

Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) with Motion Prediction
based on MPEG-4

Manufacturer

Microsoft


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