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Xvid is a MPEG-4 video codec for PC. Its purpose is to compress video in order to allow for faster transmission over computer networks or for more efficient storage on computer disks
Xvid can somewhat be seen as a ZIP for video. But unlike ZIP, Xvid is not lossless. That means that a video after compression and decompression with Xvid won't be identical to the original source. Typically however, a difference to the source is visually imperceptible.
So Xvid removes information that is not important for human perception, which is somewhat similar to MP3 for audio. This enables very high compression rates that allow to effectively work with digital video on home computers at all. To give an example: uncompressed digital video is huge and requires about 100 GB per hour at PAL resolution. The same video would require just 500 MB per hour at very high quality when compressed with Xvid. That is a compression ratio of 200:1.
Due to its free availability and developer-friendliness, Xvid is supported by many video related applications. That means there are a lot of applications available that support playback of Xvid video or use Xvid to encode video.
Many of these applications are Free Software as well and can be used free of charge. So there’s a whole ecosystem of free tools available around Xvid that help you carry out almost any task you can imagine around digital video.
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