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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founder | James Lee Sorenson |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Patrick Nola(CEO) |
| Website | sorensonmedia |
Sorenson Media was an American software company specializing invideo encoding technology. Established in December 1995 as Sorenson Vision, the company developed technology which waslicensed and ultimately acquired fromUtah State University. The company first announced itscodec (compression and decompression tool) at a developer’s preview atMacWorld Expo in January 1997.
One of the company's best known products is the Sorenson Video codec licensed toApple Inc. for theirQuickTime 3.0 software. Since its release, Sorenson Media’s video encoding technology was used in Apple'strailer web site andvideo clips for film studios such asDisney,Lucasfilm,MGM, andParamount, as well as Apple'siTunes music videos, before the switch to the industry standardH.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 forChapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2018, and was acquired at auction byNielsen Holdings in February 2019 for $11.25 million for theiraddressable advertising group.[1]
In 2003 Sorenson released its VP-100 model stand-alonevideotelephony product 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 codec designed 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 similarvideophones by other electronics manufacturers, theavailability of high speed Internet, andsponsored video relay services authorized by the U.S.Federal Communications Commission in 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 thedeaf orhard-of-hearing communities 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]
Sorenson codec may refer to any of threeproprietary video codecs:
Two versions of Sorenson Video were released, both usingSVQ1 as 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 aYCbCr 4:1:0chroma subsampling, which means every block of eight pixels share the same color components, which can causecolor 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 supports 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 Menace 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 orMPlayer, which usedDLL files extracted from QuickTime for Windows.
This incompatible version of Sorenson Video usesSVQ3 as 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 engineering of 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" (fourcc SVQ3) 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 is an implementation ofH.263 for use inFlash Video andAdobe Flash files.FFmpeg usesFLV1FourCC and Adobe frame identifiers of 0x21, 0x22 and 0x23.
As Apple began to useMPEG-4 and move away from other proprietary codecs, Sorenson Media licensed Sorenson Spark (Sorenson H.263) toMacromedia, which was included withMacromedia Flash MX v6 on March 4, 2002.[14][15] Sorenson Spark is the required video compression format forFlash 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 becameVP6.[16][17] Sorenson Spark can be still used in theAdobe Flash CS4 Professional (2008) for Flash Video files (alongsideH.264 and 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]