cinepak

In 1996, the main competitors for TrueMotion S software codec were Cinepak and Indeo.

The image quality has a similar appearance to early Cinepak compression, and the "quilting" and color bleeding effect found in other compressed video formats is also present.

They also tracked technology, noting that in the year 2000, bits of video were compressed using cinepak, which was far less efficient than the current MPEG-4 format; calculations were adjusted accordingly.

The SuperMac acquisition netted Radius the Cinepak video compression CODEC, which was still supported by most encoders and almost all media players by the early 2000s.

Consoles, on the other hand, either used a third-party codec (e.g. Cinepak for Sega Mega-CD games) or used their own proprietary format (e.g. the Philips CD-i).

The popular MPEG-2 standard pretty much destroyed Cinepak, Intel Indeo, and other early codecs in the late 1990s by compressing video streams to as much as 1/30 of the original video size while still maintaining acceptable picture quality.

The full-motion video cutscenes in the Saturn version use the Saturn's standard Cinepak software compression method, which, in spite of unusually clean encoding in this case, still tends to display more compression artifacts than seen in the PlayStation versions.

The Cinepak codec that powered early versions of both QuickTime and Windows Media video formats aimed no higher than getting 320x240 video resolution out of a standard CD-ROM drive, which means cramming 2.2Mbps plus audio and overhead into a 1.2Mbps traffic stream.

This permitted implementation on relatively slow CPUs (video encoded in Cinepak will usually play fine even on a 25 MHz 68030), but tended to result in blocky artifacting at low bitrates, which explained the criticism levelled at the full motion video video games.