Sorenson Video

» see sorensonmedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in march 1999 i was fifteen, in turkey, on a modem that held 33.6 on a good night and less than that on most nights. lucasfilm put a two and a half minute quicktime file on the web and the entire internet went at it simultaneously. the large version of that file was somewhere around twenty-five megabytes. on my line that is north of an hour and a half assuming nothing drops, which is not a download, it is a plan for the evening.

the codec inside it was sorenson video, and this is a grave for a codec, which is an odd thing to bury, because a codec is not a product anybody chooses. it is a decision somebody else made, arriving inside your machine attached to something you did actually want.

sorenson vision was founded in salt lake city in december 1995 by james lee sorenson, built on compression work licensed out of utah state university, and it announced the codec at macworld in january 1997. apple shipped it as part of quicktime 3 on 30 march 1998, carrying the fourcc svq1. what it did that mattered was hold a watchable picture at bitrates a modem could genuinely deliver, at a moment when the alternative was a postage stamp of gray mush that ran at four frames a second.

i want to be straight about this one. whether i personally sat through that particular download or caught the thing later on a machine in a cafe, i cannot tell you with a serious face twenty-seven years on, and i am not going to invent the memory. what i can say is that the shape of it is exact: a video file big enough to count as a commitment, and a codec nobody had heard of doing the only work that made any of it possible.

~ the record ~

~ the download event ~

the teaser went up on 11 march 1999. steve jobs, who had done the deal with lucasfilm to put it out through quicktime, called it the biggest download event in history, and the numbers hold up reasonably well: over a million pulls in the first twenty-four hours and around six and a half million inside three weeks. six hundred thousand people installed quicktime that day purely in order to watch it. that number is worth sitting with. the trailer was the product, and the software was a tax you paid to see it.

version 2 shipped in the same window and version 3 landed with quicktime 5.0.2 on 1 july 2001. for something like four years, if you watched a movie trailer on the internet, this is the thing that decoded it for you.

~ the h.264 thing ~

the strange fact about version 3 is that it does not look like a sorenson design in the way the earlier ones did. people who took svq3 apart in order to write free decoders for it found what reads as an adjusted h.264, and h.264 was not ratified as a standard until may 2003, nearly two years after this shipped. that is either very early standards work or a draft implemented ahead of the ink, depending how generous you are feeling.

the company also licensed an h.263 implementation to macromedia as sorenson spark, which went into flash mx in march 2002 and was what flash video ran on before vp6 turned up. so sorenson code sat underneath both of the two ways anybody watched video on the web in the early 2000s, and almost nobody watching could have named the company if you had asked them.

~ the day it died ~

the company went first. sorenson media filed chapter 11 in october 2018, and in february 2019 its addressable advertising business was auctioned to nielsen for eleven and a quarter million dollars, which is a price for a patent portfolio rather than for a going concern.

the codec outlived the company by eight months and then died in a release note. apple had already said that mojave would be the last macos to run the legacy 32-bit quicktime codecs, and macos catalina shipped on 7 october 2019 without them. sorenson 3 was on the list, along with cinepak and the old windows media formats. a file that had opened on a mac for twenty-one years stopped opening, and the official fix was to convert it first on a machine you had not upgraded yet, which is a fix with an expiry date built into it.

sorensonmedia.com still resolves. it returns a page with an empty title and an empty body. not a parking notice, not a redirect. that is a more precise description of the situation than anything the company could have written itself.

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