Codecs and containers

From Wikipedia, "a codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding and/or decoding a digital data stream or signal."

In general, codecs are utilized by multimedia applications to encode or decode audio or video streams. In order to play encoded streams, users must ensure an appropriate codec is installed.

This article deals only with codecs and application backends; see List of applications/Multimedia for a list of media players (MPlayer, mpv and VLC are popular choices).

Requirements

Playing multimedia content requires two components:

A capable media player
The appropriate codec

It is not always necessary to explicitly install codecs if you have installed a media player. For example, MPlayer pulls in a large number of codecs as dependencies, and also has codecs built in.

List of codecs

Audio

Lossless audio codecs

Apple Lossless (ALAC) — A lossless audio compression codec developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices.

https://alac.macosforge.org/ || alac-git^AUR

FLAC — Free Lossless Audio Codec.

https://xiph.org/flac/ || flac

WavPack — Lossless audio compression format that also has a lossy hybrid mode.

https://www.wavpack.com/ || wavpack

Lossy audio codecs

Format		Encode	Decode
AAC		#AAC
ATSC A/52		aften^AUR	a52dec
CELT		celt^AUR
MPEG-1
MPEG-1	MP3
Musepack (MPC)		¹
Opus		opus
Vorbis		libvorbis
Speech codecs
AMR
Speex

mppenc is not packaged.

Opus — Open, royalty-free, lossy audio codec, designed for speech and general audio coding and low latency.

https://www.opus-codec.org/ || opus

Vorbis — Open, patent-free, lossy audio codec.

https://xiph.org/vorbis/ || libvorbis

AAC

From Wikipedia:

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a proprietary audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.

Image codecs

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) — Image format based on the HEVC video codec. Often in a HEIC container.

https://github.com/strukturag/libheif || libheif

Video codecs

Format	Codec Libraries
AV1	, (decode), rav1e (encode),
AVS2	(decode)
Daala
Dirac
DV
H.265	, x265-hg^AUR
H.265	,
H.264	, x264-git^AUR
MPEG-1	(decode)
MPEG-2	(decode)
MPEG-4	Xvid ()
Theora
VP8, VP9	,

AV1 — AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is a successor codec to Google's VP9, Mozilla's Daala, Cisco's Thor. aom is the reference implementation of both encoding and decoding. dav1d is the performance focused decoder. rav1e is performance focused encoder. Most benchmark show better performances with svt-av1 than rav1e.

https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/ || aom, dav1d, rav1e, svt-av1

Schrödinger — Advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing.

https://launchpad.net/schroedinger/ || schroedinger

Container format tools

MKVToolNix — Set of tools to create, edit and inspect Matroska files.

https://mkvtoolnix.download/ || mkvtoolnix-cli, mkvtoolnix-gui

Backends

GStreamer

From https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/:

GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

Simply, GStreamer is a backend or framework utilized by many media applications. See GStreamer article.

xine

From https://sourceforge.net/projects/xine/:

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, BluRays and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet.

As an alternative to GStreamer, many media players can be configured to utilize the xine backend provided by .

Note that the xine project itself provides a capable video player, .

libavcodec

libavcodec is part of the FFmpeg project. It includes a large number of video and audio codecs. The libavcodec codecs are included with media players such as MPlayer and VLC, so you may not need to install the package itself.

Tips and tricks

No H264, mpg4 or Musepack (.mpc) in Totem Player

If you see the "The H264 plugin is missing" warning with Totem media player, install .

No H264 in Parole Player

If you see the "Parole needs H.264 decoder to play this file" warning with Parole media player, install .

gollark: As if you can "confront" GTech™.

gollark: This is just a special case of gender fluid, though.

gollark: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/379850960140500993/975846145664360468/unknown.png?

gollark: Make Minoteaur, then?

gollark: I really ought to implement osmarksISA™-2028 one of these days.

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