Real Networks??”Real has developed a set of audio and video codecs that have an amazing
ability to serve up streaming content. This protocol is not widely supported by anyone
but Real. The Helix project produces a player for Linux that enables playback of
Real media encoded files.
WMA??”Windows Media Audio is used to create high-quality digital audio. WMA is
considered a lossless codec, which means the audio doesn??™t lose quality or data as a result
of repeated compression-decompression cycles. Among its other benefits is that it??™s one of
the first widely used codecs to support digital surround sound.
WMV??”Windows Media Video is used, not surprisingly, to encode and decode video.
This is also a very high-quality encoder and is billed to produce a video that is half the
size of an MPEG-4 encoded video at a comparable quality level.
DivX??”This video codec has revolutionized digital video. Extremely high-quality video
can be stored with amazingly small file sizes when using this codec. DivX (Digital Video
Express) is based on the MPEG-4 video standard and can produce 640 ?— 480 video that
is about 15 percent of the size of the source DVD material.
Some of these codecs are integral parts of Digital Rights Management (DRM) scenarios. For example,
WMA, WMV, and DivX have elements that support DRM.
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