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112 5. Describing and Storing the VR World
5.5.2 Codecs
It would be virtually impossible for every application program that needs to
use video sources to include a full spectrum of decoding algorithms. For
one thing, new compression algorithms are emerging with regularity. But
by separating out, into loadable components, those parts of an application
program that encode and decode the data, any program can much more easily
access all kinds of multimedia content, especially audio and video material.
These self-contained units that specifically only fulfill the role of encoding
and decoding are the codecs. Under Windows, they are implemented in