The Sorenson codec (also known as Sorenson Video Codec, Sorenson Video Quantizer or SVQ) is a digital video codec devised by the company Sorenson Media. It is used in Apple's QuickTime and in Macromedia Flash.
The Sorenson Video codec first appeared with the release of QuickTime 3 on March 30, 1998. With QuickTime 4, it was given wide exposure for the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999. Sorenson Video 2 was released in March 1999; however, it mainly included minor improvements and optimizations to the Developer Edition of the encoder, as movies encoded with it were backwards compatible with the Sorenson Video decoder. An improved Sorenson Video 3 codec debuted with the release of QuickTime 5.0.2 on July 1, 2001. As Apple began to move away from proprietary codecs with its embrace of MPEG-4, Sorenson Media next licensed the newest version of the codec to Macromedia as Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263), released with Macromedia Flash 6/MX on March 4, 2002.[1] The specifications of the codec were not public, and for a long time the only way to play back Sorenson video was to use Apple's QuickTime player, or the MPlayer for Unix/Linux, which in turn piggy-backed Microsoft Windows DLL-files extracted from Apple's player.
According to an anonymous developer[2] of FFmpeg, reverse engineering of the SVQ3 codec revealed it as a tweaked version of H.264. The same developer also added support for this codec to FFmpeg, making native playback possible on all platforms supported by FFmpeg.
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