Not only for viewing, video codecs are used in variety of ways. For example, in a remote desktop software. The software needs to send video of everything on one PC's desktop to another in a real time.

Few video producers ever would have guessed that the term codec would become a household term, but with so many codecs on the market, average computer users have little choice but to be painfully ...

Hardware and software support for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has been steadily building over the last couple years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding is becoming standard in more GPUs, ...

Sorenson Media will announce on Tuesday the release of a free update to its Sorenson Video codec to support Mac OS X v10.3 “Panther.” “During Panther pre-release testing, the Sorenson Video 3 Pro ...

The MPEG Licensing Authority has indefinitely extended the royalty-free Internet broadcasting licensing of its H.264 video codec to end users. The move erases a key advantage of Google’s WebM rival ...

I think people mostly stopped caring after the DivX ;-) 3.11 codec back in 2000, I don't think there's been a huge popular demand for better compression since. Anything since that has mainly been ...