While it provides history, it does not discuss the encoder/codec distinction or bring in all of the codecs I ask about I am less interested in learning who developed each and more interested in understanding the technical distinction. But how would a video player think of each of these codecs as being separate? What features do each have that the other do not?Īlthough this previous question overlaps mine, but I do not think it answers it in total. Second, how do all these files differ from one another? I presume there is no generalizable distinction in terms of quality, because quality is a setting of an encode, not an intrinsic feature of an encoder. So my first question is what is the distinction between a codec and an encoder, and why do all encoders lead to the same 'codec' for MPEG-4 Part 10, but not for MPEG-4 Part 2?

But all of the MPEG-4 Part 10 files report as h264 irrespective of which encoder was used. That's clearly an incorrect assumption on my part. If MPEG-4 part 2 is considered a single video standard, then I would think that although there may be multiple encoders that produce video according to that standard, they'd all be the same 'codec'. Many of the files return codecs I recognize (hevc, h264, vp9, mpeg2video, wmv1, etc.) However, confusingly, they also return many codecs that I would think are implementations of MPEG-4 part 2: divx, dx50, fmp4, mp4v, mpeg4, msmpeg4v1, msmpeg4v2, msmpeg4v3, and xvid. From there I am extracting the streams -> -> codec_name key from the results. An example command I might run to get this data: ffprobe -show_format -show_streams -print_format json -loglevel quiet. Using ffmpeg, I extracted and recorded metadata, including the video codec used on the film.

I recently audited a large folder containing a variety of encoded videos from 2002-2014.

Xvid mpeg4