Indeo Video (commonly known now simply as "Indeo") is a family of audio and

video format Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) system ...

s and

codecs A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

first released in 1992, and designed for real-time video playback on desktop CPUs. While its original version was related to Intel's DVI video stream format, a hardware-only codec for the compression of television-quality video onto

compact discs The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and was capable of holding of uncompr ...

, Indeo was distinguished by being one of the first codecs allowing full-speed video playback without using

hardware acceleration Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware designed to perform specific functions more efficiently when compared to software running on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU). Any transformation of data that can be calcula ...

. Also unlike

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 achiev ...

and

TrueMotion S On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company (on the American Stock Exchange), founded in New York City in 1992 and headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designed video codec technology. ...

, the compression used the same

Y'CbCr YCbCr, Y′CbCr, also written as YCBCR or Y′CBCR, is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in digital video and photography systems. Like YPBPR, it is based on RGB primaries; the two are generally equivalent, ...

4:2:0

colorspace A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital represen ...

as the ITU's H.261 and

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a Technical standard, standard for lossy compression of video and Audio frequency, audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively ...

. Indeo use was free of charge to allow for broadest usage.

History

During the development of what became the P5

Pentium Pentium is a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel from 1993 to 2023. The Pentium (original), original Pentium was Intel's fifth generation processor, succeeding the i486; Pentium was Intel's flagship proce ...

microprocessor, the Intel Architecture Labs implemented one of the first, and at the time highest-quality, software-only video codecs, which was marketed as "Indeo Video". It has been developed since the 1980s based on the hardware-only

Digital Video Interactive Digital Video Interactive (DVI) was the first multimedia desktop video standard for IBM-compatible personal computers. It enabled full-screen, full motion video, as well as stereo audio, still images, and graphics to be presented on a DOS-based de ...

(DVI) which was previously developed by

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

. Indeo was first released in 1992 along with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Video for Windows Video for Windows was a suite of video-playing and editing software introduced by Microsoft in 1992. A runtime version for viewing videos only was made available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, which then became an integral component of Windows ...

platform. At its public introduction, it was the only video codec supported in both the Microsoft (Video for Windows) and

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

software environments, as well as by IBM's software systems of the day. It was sold to Ligos Corporation in 2000. Intel produced several different versions of the codec between 1993 and 2000, based on very different underlying mathematics and having different features. Though Indeo saw significant usage in the mid-1990s, it remained

proprietary {{Short pages monitor