Just two years later, when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash and when broadband penetration crossed 50 percent in America, YouTube was perfectly timed.
This circuit board is connected to and folded on top of a second circuit board, which contains a low-power stereo audio processing chip, or audio codec.
In the scenario we just talked about, the audio codec converts the music or podcast data from a set of digital values or numbers into an analog waveform.
It was too hard to watch video content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company eventually went out of business in 2003.
Codecs are used in every piece of technology we use in order to convert certain types of data into other types, while compressing or decompressing the data.
In fact, this video you're watching is downloaded as a compressed video file, and a video codec is actively decompressing this video's data as you watch it.
On the bottom of the PCB are a set of connectors for flat cables to be plugged into, an audio codec microchip, and an accelerometer and gyroscope microchip.
However, audio codecs can also do the reverse by encoding the analog signal from the microphone into a digital set of values, which is an analog-to-digital conversion, or ADC.
Well, codec stands for coding and decoding, and in general, it's either a piece of software or hardware that converts data or information from one format into another format, thereby compressing or decompressing data.