Video codecs

Imagine you have a toy car and you want to show it to someone who is far away. You could take a photo of the car and send it to them, but if you want to show them how the car moves and sounds, you need to make a video. However, videos can be very big and take up a lot of space on your phone or computer.

This is where video codecs come into play. Codecs are like special tools that help make videos smaller without losing all the important information. They do this by compressing the video, kind of like when you squish a ball of clay to make it smaller.

Different kinds of codecs use different ways to squish the video. Some are really good at keeping the video quality high, while others make the file even smaller but might make the video look a little fuzzy.

When you watch a video on your phone or computer, your device uses a decoder to understand the compressed video file and recreate the original video. It's like when you get a puzzle in the mail and you have to put it together. Your brain is the decoder and the puzzle pieces are the compressed video.

So, video codecs are important because they help make videos smaller and easier to share, while still keeping the important parts of the video.