Comment by Izkata
2 months ago
> And then, not even a very long time ago, the mystery unraveled. What the various codec specifications actually describe, and what these codecs actually "are", is the on-disk bitstream format, and how to decode it. Just the decode. Never the encode.
Soooo with everyone getting used to creative names instead of descriptive names over the past decade or two, I guess "codec" just became a blob and it just never crosses peoples' minds that this is right there in the name: COding/DECoding. No ENCoding.
There's a term overload involved. In implementation terms, codec stands for coder/decoder, with "coder" referring exactly to an encoding capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec
So that's a swing and a miss I'm afraid. But I'm very interested to hear what do you think a "coder" library does in this context if not encode, and why is it juxtaposed with "decoder" if not for doing the exact opposite.