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Sorenson Media
Company typePrivate
IndustryComputer software
FounderJames Lee Sorenson
Headquarters
Salt Lake City,Utah
,
U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Patrick Nola(CEO)
Websitesorensonmedia.com

Sorenson Mediawas an American software company specializing invideo encodingtechnology. Established in December 1995 as Sorenson Vision, the company developed technology which waslicensedand ultimately acquired fromUtah State University.The company first announced itscodec(compression and decompression tool) at a developer’s preview atMacWorld Expoin January 1997.

One of the company's best known products is the Sorenson Video codec licensed toApple Inc.for theirQuickTime3.0 software. Since its release, Sorenson Media’s video encoding technology was used in Apple'strailerweb site andvideo clipsfor film studios such asDisney,Lucasfilm,MGM,andParamount,as well as Apple'siTunesmusic videos, before the switch to the industry standardH.264format.

The company was led by its chairman and founder James Lee Sorenson; its final president and CEO was Patrick Nola. The company filed forChapter 11 bankruptcyin October 2018, and was acquired at auction byNielsen Holdingsin February 2019 for $11.25 million for theiraddressable advertisinggroup.[1]

Technical service for the deaf and Sorenson Communications[edit]

In 2003 Sorenson released its VP-100 model stand-alonevideotelephonyproduct for users withhearing loss.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 aremote control,and avideo compression codecdesigned for improved video quality and ease of use with aVideo Relay Service(VRS). The product received favorable reviews[by whom?]and is used at educational facilities for the deaf[which?],and elsewhere[where?]in the deaf community.[2]

Following the introduction of similarvideophonesby other electronics manufacturers, theavailability of high speed Internet,andsponsored video relay servicesauthorized by the U.S.Federal Communications Commissionin 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 thedeaforhard-of-hearingcommunities 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[edit]

Sorenson codecmay refer to any of threeproprietaryvideo codecs:

Sorenson Video[edit]

Two versions of Sorenson Video were released, both usingSVQ1as theirFourCC.

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 aYCbCr4:1:0chroma subsampling,which means every block of eight pixels share the same color components, which can causecolor bleedingacross pixels. This was solved in version 3 and the Spark version which both use the more common YCbCr 4:2:0 subsampling.FFmpegsupports 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 forStar Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menaceon 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 orMPlayer,which usedDLLfiles extracted from QuickTime for Windows.

Sorenson Video 3[edit]

This incompatible version of Sorenson Video usesSVQ3as itsFourCC.

This version was released with QuickTime 5.0.2 on July 1, 2001. It was available exclusively for QuickTime.[7][8]Apple QuickTime later focused on other compression formats and moved Sorenson Video 3 to a separate group called "legacy encoders".[9]According to an anonymous developer ofFFmpeg,[10]reverse engineeringof the SVQ3 codec (Sorenson Video 3) revealed it as a tweaked version ofH.264.[11]The same developer added support for this codec to FFmpeg. FFmpeg supports decoding of "Sorenson Vector Quantizer 3" (fourccSVQ3) and Sorenson Vector Quantizer 1 (fourcc SVQ1) starting with version 0.4.7, released in 2003.[12]

Sorenson Video 3 comes withSorenson Squeeze.[13]

Sorenson Spark[edit]

Sorenson Spark is an implementation ofH.263for use inFlash VideoandAdobe Flash files.FFmpegusesFLV1FourCCand Adobe frame identifiers of 0x21, 0x22 and 0x23.

As Apple began to useMPEG-4and move away from other proprietary codecs, Sorenson Media licensed Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263) toMacromedia,which was included withMacromedia Flash MXv6 on March 4, 2002.[14][15]Sorenson Spark is the required video compression format forFlash Player6 and 7.

Macromedia later tried to find a better video codec. Starting with Flash Player 8 (released in September 2005), the preferred video codec becameVP6.[16][17]Sorenson Spark can be still used in theAdobe Flash CS4 Professional(2008) for Flash Video files (alongsideH.264and 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[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^"Nielsen Forms Addressable TV Ad Group After Buying Sorenson Media's Assets for $11.25 Million".Variety.2019-02-19.
  2. ^abFitzgerald, 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.orgFFMpeg 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 PreviewsArchived2010-09-19 at theWayback Machine.Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  9. ^"Apple Mailing Lists - batch export: where is sorenson?"(Mailing list). Archived fromthe originalon 2009-01-16.Retrieved2009-08-09.
  10. ^"Deconstructing H.264/AVC".DrunkenBlog.Archived fromthe originalon July 24, 2008.
  11. ^abLarsson, Benjamin (2009-03-17)."h263-svq3 optimizations".FFmpeg-devel(Mailing list).Retrieved2009-08-09.
  12. ^FFmpegChangelog.Retrieved on 2009-08-10.
  13. ^Sorenson MediaSV3 Pro Codec.Retrieved on 2009-08-09.Archived2013-10-20 at theWayback Machine
  14. ^"Macromedia and Sorenson Media Bring Video to Macromedia Flash Content and Applications".Macromedia(Press release). 2002-03-04.
  15. ^Adobe LiveDocsAbout the Sorenson Spark codec[permanent dead link].Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  16. ^abAdobeFlash CS4 Professional Documentation - Digital video and Flash.Retrieved on 2009-08-09.
  17. ^abKaourantin.net (2005-08-13)The quest for a new video codec in Flash 8Archived2009-02-06 at theWayback Machine.Retrieved on 2009-08-10.
  18. ^"Sorenson Spark".MultimediaWiki.Retrieved2009-11-03.
  19. ^FFmpeg.org (2003)"FFmpeg 0.4.8 Documentation - Video Codecs".Archived fromthe originalon December 7, 2003.

External links[edit]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sorenson_Media&oldid=1225363133#Encoding_technologies"