Cinepak

Cinepak, also known as Compact Video Codec or Radius Cinepak, is a discontinued video codec developed by SuperMac Technology (later Radius) in the early 1990s. It was a widely used codec for software-based video playback on personal computers, particularly during the rise of CD-ROM multimedia titles.

Cinepak achieved popularity due to its relatively good performance on the limited hardware available at the time. Its strength lay in its ability to decompress video efficiently, placing a relatively low demand on the CPU for playback, albeit at the expense of encoding time. Encoding video using Cinepak could be significantly slower than real-time.

The codec employed a lossy compression scheme, meaning that some data was discarded during the compression process to achieve smaller file sizes. This resulted in a trade-off between file size and video quality. Cinepak was known for introducing noticeable artifacts, especially at lower bitrates and during scenes with rapid motion. Common artifacts included blockiness and color banding.

Cinepak supported various color depths and frame sizes, making it versatile for different applications. It was commonly used in CD-ROM games, educational software, and early digital video applications on platforms like Windows and Macintosh.

Over time, Cinepak was superseded by more advanced video codecs offering better compression ratios and image quality, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and subsequently MPEG-4. While largely obsolete, Cinepak remains relevant in the context of historical digital media and legacy systems. Certain older software and files may still utilize Cinepak encoding, requiring the codec to be installed for proper playback.