XviD 1.1.3

Xvid is a video codec for PC, whereas codec is an abbreviation for [co]der/[dec]oder, hence describes a software to encode and decode digital video. The purpose of encoding video data is to reduce redundancies €“ that means to make it smaller for faster transmission over PC workstation networks or for more efficient storage on PC workstation disks. Hence, Xvid can somewhat be seen as a ZIP for video. But unlike ZIP, Xvid is not lossless. That means that a video after compression and decompression with Xvid wont be identical to the original source. Typically however, a difference to the source is visually imperceptible. So Xvid removes information that is not important for human perception, who is somewhat similar to MP3 for audio. This enables very high compression rates that allow to effectively work with digital video on home computers at all. To give an example: uncompressed digital video is huge and requires about 100 GB per hour at PAL resolution. The same video would require just 500 MB per hour at very high quality when compressed with Xvid.