Cinepak

Cinepak is a lossy video codec developed by Peter Barrett at SuperMac Technologies, and released in 1991 with the Video Spigot, and then in 1992 as part of Apple Computer's QuickTime video suite. One of the first video compression tools to achieve full motion video on CD-ROM, it was designed to encode 320×240 resolution video at 1× (150 kbyte/s) CD-ROM transfer rates. The original name of this codec was CompactVideo, which is why its FourCC identifier is CVID. The codec was ported to the Microsoft Windows platform in 1993. It was also used on first-generation and some second-generation CD-ROM game consoles, such as the Atari Jaguar CD,Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and 3DO.

It was the primary video codec of early versions of QuickTime and Microsoft Video for Windows, but was later superseded by Sorenson Video, Intel Indeo, and most recently MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. However, movies compressed with Cinepak are generally still playable in most media players.

Cinepak is based on vector quantization, which is a significantly different algorithm from the discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm used by most current codecs (in particular the MPEG family, as well as JPEG). This permitted implementation on relatively slow CPUs (video encoded in Cinepak will usually play fine even on a 25 MHz Motorola 68030, consoles like the Sega CD usually used even slower CPUs, e.g. a 12.5 MHz 68000), but tended to result in blocky artifacting at low bitrates, which explained the criticism leveled at the FMV-based video games. Cinepak files tend to be about 70% larger than similar quality MPEG-4 Part 2 or Theora files.

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