Codecs and containers

From Wikipedia, "a codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding and/or decoding a digital data stream or signal."

In general, codecs are utilized by multimedia applications to encode or decode audio or video streams. In order to play encoded streams, users must ensure an appropriate codec is installed.

This article deals only with codecs and application backends; see List of applications/Multimedia for a list of media players (MPlayer, mpv and VLC are popular choices).

Requirements

Playing multimedia content requires two components:

A capable media player
The appropriate codec

It is not always necessary to explicitly install codecs if you have installed a media player. For example, MPlayer pulls in a large number of codecs as dependencies, and also has codecs built in.

List of codecs

Audio

Lossless audio codecs

Apple Lossless (ALAC) — A lossless audio compression codec developed by Apple and deployed on all of its platforms and devices.

https://alac.macosforge.org/ || alac-git^AUR

FLAC — Free Lossless Audio Codec.

https://xiph.org/flac/ || flac

WavPack — Lossless audio compression format that also has a lossy hybrid mode.

https://www.wavpack.com/ || wavpack

Lossy audio codecs

Format		Encode	Decode
AAC		#AAC
ATSC A/52		aften^AUR	a52dec
CELT		celt^AUR
MPEG-1			libmad
MPEG-1	MP3	lame	libmad
Musepack (MPC)		– ¹	libmpcdec
Opus		opus
Vorbis		libvorbis
Speech codecs
AMR		opencore-amr
Speex		speex

mppenc is not packaged.

CELT — Open, royalty-free lossy audio codec, optimized for low latency.

https://www.celt-codec.org/ || celt^AUR

LAME — MP3 encoder and graphical frame analyzer.

https://lame.sourceforge.io/ || lame

liba52 — Free library for decoding ATSC A/52 (Dolby Digital) streams (lossy).

https://liba52.sourceforge.io/ || a52dec

libdca — Free library for decoding DTS Coherent Acoustics streams.

https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdca.html || libdca

MAD — High-quality MPEG audio decoder.

https://www.underbit.com/products/mad/ || libmad

Musepack (MPC) — Open source lossy audio codec, designed for transparency.

https://musepack.net/ || libmpcdec

opencore-amr — Open source implementation of the Adaptive Multi Rate (AMR) speech codec.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/opencore-amr/ || opencore-amr

Opus — Open, royalty-free, lossy audio codec, designed for speech and general audio coding and low latency.

https://www.opus-codec.org/ || opus

Speex — Patent-free, lossy audio compression format designed for speech.

https://www.speex.org/ || speex

Vorbis — Open, patent-free, lossy audio codec.

https://xiph.org/vorbis/ || libvorbis

AAC

From Wikipedia:

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a proprietary audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.

FAAC — Proprietary AAC audio encoder.

https://faac.sourceforge.net/ || faac

FAAD2 — ISO AAC audio decoder.

https://faac.sourceforge.net/ || faad2

Fraunhofer FDK AAC — OpenCORE Framework implementation Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) encoder. Modified library of Fraunhofer AAC decoder and encoder.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/opencore-amr/ || libfdk-aac (codec library) fdkaac (CLI frontend for libfdk-aac)

Nero AAC — Nero AAC reference quality MPEG-4 and 3GPP audio codec. (deprecated)

https://www.nero.com/ || neroaac-bin^AUR

Image codecs

JasPer — Software-based implementation of the codec specified in the emerging JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard.

https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~frodo/jasper/ || jasper

OpenJPEG — Open source JPEG 2000 codec.

https://www.openjpeg.org/ || openjpeg^AUR

WebP — An image format employing both lossy and lossless compression. It is currently developed by Google.

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/ || libwebp

AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) — Image format based on the AV1 video codec.

https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif || libavif

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) — Image format based on the HEVC video codec. Often in a HEIC container.

https://github.com/strukturag/libheif || libheif

JPEG XL — Royalty-free image format developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group which aims for broad usage, capable of re-encoding JPEGs while avoiding generation loss.

https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ || libjxl

Video codecs

Format	Codec Libraries
AV1	aom, dav1d (decode), rav1e (encode), svt-av1
AVS2	davs2^AUR (decode)
Daala	daala-git^AUR
Dirac	schroedinger
DV	libdv
H.265	x265
H.265	libde265
H.264	x264
MPEG-1	libmpeg2 (decode)
MPEG-2	libmpeg2 (decode)
MPEG-4	Xvid (xvidcore)
Theora	libtheora
VP8, VP9	libvpx

AV1 — AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is a successor codec to Google's VP9, Mozilla's Daala, Cisco's Thor. aom is the reference implementation of both encoding and decoding. dav1d is the performance focused decoder. rav1e is performance focused encoder. Most benchmark show better performances with svt-av1 than rav1e.

https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/ || aom, dav1d, rav1e, svt-av1

Daala — Research video codec under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation and sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation. The goal of the project is to provide a free to implement, use and distribute digital media format and reference implementation with technical performance superior to h.265.

https://www.xiph.org/daala/ || daala-git^AUR

libde265 — Open source implementation of the h.265 video codec.

https://github.com/strukturag/libde265 || libde265

libdv — The Quasar DV codec (libdv) is a software codec for DV video.

https://libdv.sourceforge.net/ || libdv

libmpeg2 — Library for decoding MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video streams.

https://libmpeg2.sourceforge.io/ || libmpeg2

Schrödinger — Advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing.

https://launchpad.net/schroedinger/ || schroedinger

Theora — Open video codec developed by the Xiph.org.

https://www.theora.org/ || libtheora

VP9 — High-quality, open video format for the web that's freely available to everyone. Improved version of earlier VP8 codec.

https://www.webmproject.org || libvpx

x264 — Free library for encoding H264/AVC video streams.

https://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html || x264

x265 — Open-source project and free application library for encoding video streams into the H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) format.

https://www.x265.org/ || x265

Xvid — Open source MPEG-4 video codec.

https://www.xvid.com/ || xvidcore

Container format tools

MKVToolNix — Set of tools to create, edit and inspect Matroska files.

https://mkvtoolnix.download/ || mkvtoolnix-cli, mkvtoolnix-gui

MP4Joiner — A collection of GUI tools to manipulate MP4 files (MP4Joiner, MP4Splitter).

https://www.mp4joiner.org/ || mp4joiner^AUR

OGMtools — Information, extraction or creation for OGG media streams.

https://www.bunkus.org/videotools/ogmtools || ogmtools

Backends

GStreamer

From https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/:

GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

Simply, GStreamer is a backend or framework utilized by many media applications. See GStreamer article.

xine

From https://sourceforge.net/projects/xine/:

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, BluRays and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet.

As an alternative to GStreamer, many media players can be configured to utilize the xine backend provided by xine-lib.

Note that the xine project itself provides a capable video player, xine-ui.

libavcodec

libavcodec is part of the FFmpeg project. It includes a large number of video and audio codecs. The libavcodec codecs are included with media players such as MPlayer and VLC, so you may not need to install the ffmpeg package itself.

Tips and tricks

No H264, mpg4 or Musepack (.mpc) in Totem Player

If you see the "The H264 plugin is missing" warning with Totem media player, install gst-libav.

No H264 in Parole Player

If you see the "Parole needs H.264 decoder to play this file" warning with Parole media player, install gst-libav.