Sorenson Media

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Sorenson Media
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Patrick Nola (CEO)
Websitesorensonmedia.com

Sorenson Media was an American software company specializing in

MacWorld Expo
in January 1997.

One of the company's best known products is the Sorenson Video codec licensed to

H.264
format.

The company was led by its chairman and founder James Lee Sorenson; its final president and CEO was Patrick Nola. The company filed for

addressable advertising group.[1]

Technical service for the deaf and Sorenson Communications

In 2003 Sorenson released its VP-100 model stand-alone

which?], and elsewhere[where?] in the deaf community.[2]

Following the introduction of similar

sponsored video relay services authorized by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 2002, VRS for the deaf underwent rapid growth in the United States.[2]

In May 2005 Sorenson Media split off a new company, Sorenson Communications, which focuses on products for the

hard-of-hearing communities while Sorenson Media would focus on video compression software.[3] In April 2022 the private investment firm Ariel Alternatives acquired a 52.5% ownership stake in Sorenson Communications which valued Sorenson at $1.3 billion.[4][5]

Encoding technologies

Sorenson codec may refer to any of three proprietary video codecs:

Sorenson Video

Two versions of Sorenson Video were released, both using SVQ1 as their FourCC.

Version one first appeared with the release of QuickTime 3 on March 30, 1998. The backward-compatible version two was released with QuickTime 4 on March 11, 1999, which mainly included minor improvements and optimizations to the Developer Edition of the encoder, so encoded movies would be backwards compatible with the QuickTime 3 release. Changes for version two were only made to the encoder, not to the compression format. This format uses a YCbCr 4:1:0 chroma subsampling, which means every block of eight pixels share the same color components, which can cause color bleeding across pixels. This was solved in version 3 and the Spark version which both use the more common YCbCr 4:2:0 subsampling. FFmpeg supports decoding of Sorenson Video since 2002, encoding of SVQ1 was added in 2004 for 0.4.9-pre1.[6]

Version two was given wide exposure from the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999.

The official specifications of the codec are not public. For a long time the only way to play back Sorenson Video was to use Apple's QuickTime or MPlayer, which used DLL files extracted from QuickTime for Windows.

Sorenson Video 3

This incompatible version of Sorenson Video uses SVQ3 as its FourCC.

This version was released with QuickTime 5.0.2 on July 1, 2001. It was available exclusively for QuickTime.

fourcc SVQ3) and Sorenson Vector Quantizer 1 (fourcc SVQ1) starting with version 0.4.7, released in 2003.[12]

Sorenson Video 3 comes with Sorenson Squeeze.[13]

Sorenson Spark

Sorenson Spark is an implementation of H.263 for use in Flash Video and Adobe Flash files. FFmpeg uses FLV1 FourCC and Adobe frame identifiers of 0x21, 0x22 and 0x23.

As Apple began to use

Flash Player
6 and 7.

Macromedia later tried to find a better video codec. Starting with Flash Player 8 (released in September 2005), the preferred video codec became

H.264 and VP6).[16] According to Adobe engineer Tinic Uro, Sorenson Spark is an incomplete implementation of H.263.[17][18] It differs mostly in header structure and ranges of the coefficients.[11]

FFmpeg in 2003 added encoding and decoding support for Sorenson H.263.[19]

See also

  • Videophone

References

  1. ^ "Nielsen Forms Addressable TV Ad Group After Buying Sorenson Media's Assets for $11.25 Million". Variety. 2019-02-19.
  2. ^ a b Fitzgerald, Thomas J. For the Deaf, Communication Without the Wait, The New York Times, December 18, 2003.
  3. ^ Nii, Jenifer K. (April 27, 2005). "Sorenson Media to split". Deseret News.
  4. ^ Politis, David (June 6, 2022). "Utah-Based Sorenson And Its New Owners Go All-In On Serving Diverse Communities". Silicon Slopes Newsroom.
  5. ^ "Sorenson Announces Change in Ownership". Sorenson Communications. April 4, 2022.
  6. ^ FFmpeg.org FFMpeg General Documentation - Video Codecs. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  7. ^ Sorenson Media (2001-07-02) Sorenson Media Announces the Availability of Sorenson Video 3 Exclusively for QuickTime. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  8. ^ Apple (2000-10-10) Apple Releases QuickTime 5 and QuickTime Streaming Server 3 Public Previews Archived 2010-09-19 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  9. ^ "Apple Mailing Lists - batch export: where is sorenson ?" (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 2009-01-16. Retrieved 2009-08-09.
  10. ^ "Deconstructing H.264/AVC". DrunkenBlog. Archived from the original on July 24, 2008.
  11. ^ a b Larsson, Benjamin (2009-03-17). "h263-svq3 optimizations". FFmpeg-devel (Mailing list). Retrieved 2009-08-09.
  12. ^ FFmpeg Changelog. Retrieved on 2009-08-10.
  13. ^ Sorenson Media SV3 Pro Codec. Retrieved on 2009-08-09. Archived 2013-10-20 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ^ "Macromedia and Sorenson Media Bring Video to Macromedia Flash Content and Applications". Macromedia (Press release). 2002-03-04.
  15. ^ Adobe LiveDocs About the Sorenson Spark codec[permanent dead link]. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  16. ^ a b Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Documentation - Digital video and Flash. Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  17. ^ a b Kaourantin.net (2005-08-13) The quest for a new video codec in Flash 8 Archived 2009-02-06 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved on 2009-08-10.
  18. ^ "Sorenson Spark". MultimediaWiki. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  19. ^ FFmpeg.org (2003) "FFmpeg 0.4.8 Documentation - Video Codecs". Archived from the original on December 7, 2003.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sorenson_Media&oldid=1210682239#Encoding_technologies"