Codecs used to be for nerds. People are fighting holy wars about what's the correct codec. Heavy hardware, under lightning attack by flexible software.
Heavy hardware is brought to bear against the softies.
But the softies strike back. The Codec Wars. As we've discussed before, a codec was needed with old-style analog video to capture and playback video. This is where video is encoded and decoded in real time. Some Firewire developers, notably Adaptec, miro and Radius asked themselves the same question.