We recognised early on that video playback is at the heart of our product and to be able to have full control over performance, stability and continuity, we invested early on in our own codec family, FlexRes. SW: “Indeed, Hippotizer is not affected by this change. LSi: Green Hippo’s FlexRes codec allows those using Hippotizer products to continue to work uninterrupted - can you elaborate on this please? What is the FlexRes codec? With the newer versions of QuickTime it’s much harder to write third party plugins, so it remains to be seen if we will see new codecs coming out that are suitable for our industry.” As this is now a pretty old standard, Adobe announced that from 24 April it would no longer support QuickTime 7, and in turn HAP doesn’t work anymore.

Adobe supports QuickTime and the HAP codec is based on QuickTime 7. SW: “Well, strictly speaking, Adobe doesn’t have anything to do with the HAP codec directly. LSi: Why and when did Adobe drop HAP support? So, HAP is doing a great job and thanks to Tom Butterworth, who gave this QuickTime codec to the industry for free, it’s very popular as it finds this sweet spot between quality and playback performance.” This is what the HAP codec is really good at - as it’s based on a graphics card-based compression technology, there is an optimal balance between file size and decompression speed allowing media servers to play out many more pixels than before. This reduces their file size and they can be handled more easily, loaded faster and, with the right playback architecture, played back with less overhead. Sean Westgate: “To get maximum playback performance in real-time, video clips need to be compressed using a codec.

LSi: For those who might not know, can you please explain the importance of codecs and what the HAP codec is? LSi spoke to Sean Westgate, technical director and founder of Green Hippo, to find out more about all things HAP, FlexRes and more. Step forward Green Hippo, whose FlexRes codec means its Hippotizer servers are unaffected by the change. With Adobe having dropped support of QuickTime 7 (a popular platform that included the HAP codec) as of 24 April, a new workaround for many video professionals is needed. For many, the HAP codec - inter-operable between platforms - was key to their work. UK - For anyone working with video, codecs play a vital role in compressing clips for optimum playback in real-time scenarios.

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