Indeo Video

~ the obit ~

Indeo is a name i met almost entirely inside error messages. on a 33.6k modem in 1999 video did not come down the wire, it came on a disc somebody handed you, and the ritual was to double-click the AVI, get audio playing over a grey rectangle, and then go looking for whatever codec the thing had been made with. Half the time the answer was Indeo, and it was already the wrong half of the decade to be asking.

Intel Architecture Labs built it while the Pentium was being developed, out of work going back to Digital Video Interactive, a hardware-only compression system that needed a card in the machine. indeo was the version that did not. It shipped in november 1992 with Video for Windows 1.0 and would run on a 386SX, which at the time read as a small miracle rather than a specification.

At its public introduction it was the only codec supported in both Microsoft's Video for Windows and Apple's QuickTime, and IBM's systems handled it too. Intel gave it away rather than licensing it, on the reasoning that a codec everybody could use sells more processors than a codec somebody has to buy. That worked, and it is also the reason nobody ever owned enough of it to keep it alive.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

Through the middle nineties Indeo was the codec inside the CD-ROM. really though, encyclopedias and game cutscenes both leaned on it, because a disc could hold the video but the machine reading the disc could not decode anything expensive. Encoding cost far more computation than decoding did, and Intel's ProShare conferencing hardware used exactly that shape: an add-in card to encode, any plain PC on the other end to watch.

The versions kept moving underneath the name. close enough. version 3 was a discrete cosine transform codec very close to Cinepak in design, and version 5, the last one, went to a wavelet method. Indeo was still turning up in game intros as late as 1998. back then, MPEG was already coming, processors were getting fast enough that being tuned for Intel chips stopped being an advantage, and Intel slowed the work and stopped marketing it.

~ the day it died ~

Intel sold Indeo to Ligos Corporation in 2000 and version 5.11 was effectively the end of development. in fairness, that is the first death and almost nobody noticed it, because the codec kept working and the files kept playing.

The second death took nine more years and came from a direction nobody planned for. the Windows implementation had remote code execution holes in it. Microsoft tried to pull it out of Windows XP SP1 and had to ship a hotfix putting it back, because games stopped responding when their opening video played. The knowledge base article about that is from 2002 and is a small monument to how much software was quietly depending on this thing.

On 8 december 2009 Microsoft published Security Advisory 954157, Security Enhancements for the Indeo Codec. it blocks the codec from being launched in Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player and removes its ability to load at all while browsing. The advisory says openly that Microsoft is not fixing the specific vulnerabilities, only reducing the attack surface, and Vista and Windows 7 were already listed as not affected because they had shut the same door earlier.

~ the long tail ~

The stated reason is worth keeping. Microsoft had licensed the codec from Intel and by then almost certainly did not hold the source needed to repair it. So the fix was a wall rather than a patch, which is what happens to a format when the people who own the operating system and the people who own the code stop being reachable to each other.

The files did not die with it. anyway, FFmpeg reverse engineered decoders for versions 2 through 5 between 2003 and 2011, so an old Indeo AVI opens today in VLC without complaint. that is the ordinary ending for a dead codec: it plays fine now in software written by volunteers, and it will not play in any of the software it was actually made for.

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