Sorenson Media was an American software company specializing in video encoding technology. Established in December 1995 as Sorenson Vision, the company developed technology which was

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

d and ultimately acquired from

Utah State University Utah State University (USU or Utah State) is a public land-grant research university in Logan, Utah. It is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. With nearly 20,000 students living on or near campus, USU is Uta ...

. The company first announced its

codec A codec is a device or computer program 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 on a signal or ...

(compression and decompression tool) at a developer’s preview at

MacWorld Expo Macworld/iWorld was an information technology trade show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally ''Macworld Expo'' and then ''Macworld Conference & Expos ...

in January 1997. One of the company's best known products is the Sorenson Video codec licensed to Apple Inc. for their

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

3.0 software. Since its release, Sorenson Media’s video encoding technology was used in Apple's trailer web site and

video clip Video clips refer to mostly short videos, most of the time called memes, which are short videos of silly jokes and funny clips, most of the time coming from movies or any entertainment videos such as YouTube. The term is also used more loosely t ...

s for film studios such as

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

Lucasfilm Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC is an American film and television production company and a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, which is a business segment of The Walt Disney Company. The studio is best known for creating and producing the ''Star Wars'' and ' ...

, MGM, and

Paramount Paramount (from the word ''paramount'' meaning "above all others") may refer to: Entertainment and music companies * Paramount Global, also known simply as Paramount, an American mass media company formerly known as ViacomCBS. The following busin ...

, as well as Apple's iTunes music videos, before the switch to the industry standard 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

Chapter 11 bankruptcy Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, whet ...

in October 2018, and was acquired at auction by

Nielsen Holdings Nielsen Holdings plc is an American information, data and market measurement firm. Nielsen operates in over 100 countries and employs approximately 44,000 people worldwide. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and used ...

in February 2019 for $11.25 million for their

addressable advertising Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a foc ...

group.

Technical service for the deaf

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

videotelephony Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio and video signals by people in different locations for real time communication.McGraw-Hill Concise Enc ...

product for users with

hearing loss Hearing loss is a partial or total inability to hear. Hearing loss may be present at birth or acquired at any time afterwards. Hearing loss may occur in one or both ears. In children, hearing problems can affect the ability to acquire spoken la ...

. It was designed to output its video to a deaf user's standard television set in order to lower the cost of acquisition. It also provided a

remote control In electronics, a remote control (also known as a remote or clicker) is an electronic device used to operate another device from a distance, usually wirelessly. In consumer electronics, a remote control can be used to operate devices such as ...

, and a video compression codec designed for improved video quality and ease of use with a Video Relay Service (VRS). The product received favorable reviews and is used at educational facilities for the deaf, and elsewhere in the deaf community.Fitzgerald, Thomas J
For the Deaf, Communication Without the Wait
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', December 18, 2003. Following the introduction of similar videophones by other electronics manufacturers, the availability of high speed Internet, and sponsored video relay services authorized by the U.S.

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisd ...

in 2002, VRS for the deaf underwent rapid growth in the United States.

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 A FourCC ("four-character code") is a sequence of four bytes (typically ASCII) used to uniquely identify data formats. It originated from the OSType or ResType metadata system used in classic Mac OS and was adopted for the Amiga/Electronic Arts I ...

. 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 YCbCr, Y′CbCr, or Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr, also written as YCBCR or Y′CBCR, is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in video and digital photography systems. Y′ is the Luma (video), luma component and CB and CR are t ...

4:1:0

chroma subsampling Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance. It is u ...

, 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 FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of ...

supports decoding of Sorenson Video since 2002, encoding of SVQ1 was added in 2004 for 0.4.9-pre1. Version two was given wide exposure from the release of the teaser trailer for ''

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace ''Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace'' is a 1999 American Epic film, epic space opera film written and directed by George Lucas. It stars Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ahmed Best, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Dan ...

'' 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 MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for ...

, which used DLL files extracted from QuickTime for Windows.

Sorenson Video 3

This incompatible version of Sorenson Video uses ''SVQ3'' as its

. This version was released with QuickTime 5.0.2 on July 1, 2001. It was available exclusively for QuickTime. Apple QuickTime later focused on other compression formats and moved Sorenson Video 3 to a separate group called "legacy encoders". According to an anonymous developer of

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompli ...

of the SVQ3 codec (Sorenson Video 3) revealed it as a tweaked version of

H.263 H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videotelephony. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x fam ...

. The same developer added support for this codec to FFmpeg. FFmpeg supports decoding of "Sorenson Vector Quantizer 3" (

fourcc A FourCC ("four-character code") is a sequence of four bytes (typically ASCII) used to uniquely identify data formats. It originated from the OSType or ResType metadata system used in classic Mac OS and was adopted for the Amiga/Electronic Arts I ...

SVQ3) and Sorenson Vector Quantizer 1 (fourcc SVQ1) starting with version 0.4.7, released in 2003.FFmpe
Changelog
Retrieved on 2009-08-10. Sorenson Video 3 comes with Sorenson Squeeze.

Sorenson Spark

Sorenson Spark is an implementation of

for use in

Flash Video Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ...

and Adobe Flash files.

uses ''FLV1''

and Adobe frame identifiers of 0x21, 0x22 and 0x23. As Apple began to use

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

and move away from other proprietary codecs, Sorenson Media licensed Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263) to

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe System ...

, which was included with Macromedia Flash MX v6 on March 4, 2002. Sorenson Spark is the required video compression format for 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 VP6.Kaourantin.net (2005-08-13
The quest for a new video codec in Flash 8
. Retrieved on 2009-08-10. Sorenson Spark can be still used in the Adobe Flash CS4 Professional (2008) for Flash Video files (alongside H.264 and VP6).Adob
Flash CS4 Professional Documentation - Digital video and Flash
Retrieved on 2009-08-09. According to Adobe engineer Tinic Uro, Sorenson Spark is an incomplete implementation of H.263. It differs mostly in header structure and ranges of the coefficients. FFmpeg in 2003 added encoding and decoding support for Sorenson H.263.

References

External links

* format description by the Library of Congress {{Compression formats Software companies based in California Companies based in Carlsbad, California Video codecs Videotelephony Software companies of the United States