Chief Delphi

I did some checking on what Quicktime codec means.

Check out http://mornmist.2y.net/~blibbler/CODEC_discussion/.

Summarizing, the ones that I can see available in 3DSMAX are:

3ivx
Motion JPEG
On2 VP3
Open DivX ;)
Sorenson

Some details copied from above web site:

Quicktime comes with three varieties of Motion JPEG:

Motion JPEG A; Motion JPEG B; and Photo JPEG.
When JPEG was first released, different groups were impressed with the compression ratio that it gave, and decided that it would be useful to use it as the basis for a small, relatively lossless hardware video codec. They added interlacing support to it (Interlacing is a video, not an image concept) and released. Different groups released different implementations of it, but they were essentially the same. To support both implementations, Quicktime needs to have separate codecs to deal with each one. Thus: MJPEG A and MJPEG B.

Photo JPEG is a different beast. While MJPEG A & B were based off of hardware implementations of JPEG, Photo JPEG exists due to the magic of Quicktime. It works similar to the other image based codecs, such as TIFF, BMP, and PNG. Basically, it uses Quicktime to display a series of JPEG images in quick succession. Because it is just a series of quicktime images stored, and played in quick succession, it does not support the video concept of interlacing.

Encoding:
All of the Motion JPEGs (including Photo JPEG) are very fast at encoding. In my very informal tests, I found that they are some of the fastest encoders available for quicktime.

Since all of these codecs use the quicktime JPEG component to create JPEG images, they should all be roughly the same size, and the same speed.

Decoding:
Comprehensiveness of settings:
MJPEG A & B both have support for interlacing.

Current Version:
Unknown... probably varies slightly with each Quicktime release.
Price: Free.
Encoder Platforms:
Many.
Decoder Platforms:
Many.
Block Size:
16
Automatic Keyframes?:
Since every frame is a keyframe, this is not relevant.

Sorenson first appeared as the flagship codec of Quicktime 3. It was significantly better than the codecs that were used previously (Mainly CinePak). The encoder was updated when Quicktime 4 was released. Sorenson 2 encoded films could be played back on Quicktime 3. It was faster, had higher quality, and had a lot more features. Through versions 2.1, and 2.2, Sorenson added Altivec, and Multiprocessor support to the Sorenson codec.

Quicktime 5 was meant to include Sorenson 3. Due to unexplained bugs, it was not included in the final releas. Unlike Sorenson 2, Sorenson 3 would not run on previous versions of Quicktime. Sorenson released a beta of their profestional codec to the public... so many people got a glimpse of what it could do. It encoded much faster, and produced smaller files, and looked better than Sorenson 2.

The final of Sorenson 3 was finally included with Quicktime 5.02.

Quality/Size:
Compared to the codecs that were available on Quicktime before Sorenson, it was a big deal, but compared to modern codecs such as: 3ivx, and On2 VP3, it is left in the dirt. Sorenson 3 is better than Sorenson 2, but even it can't compare to 3ivx, or VP3.

Sorenson 2 is comparible to MPEG1. Since there are many different encoders for MPEG1, some are better than Sorenson 2, others are worse. Sorenson 3, is generally better than MPEG1, in my opinion.

Other people have achieved much better quality from Sorenson 3 than I have.

Encoding:
Sorenson 2 is fairly slow at encoding. Even with fast encoding turned on, it is still quite slow.

Sorenson 3, on the other hand is very fast at encoding. It is the fastest codec that I played around with, and that was without it on its fastest setting.

Decoding:
Sorenson 2 seems to be optimised for the playback of smaller movies. It doesn't handle large movies too well. When it gets a movie that is a bit big for it, it generally stutters.

Sorenson 3 seems more geared to larger movies.

Comprehensiveness of settings:
Both Sorenson 2, and Sorenson 3 professional codecs have more settings than most people will ever need.

Objective ratings:
Current Version:
2.2 (or 3)
Price:
free,$300 or so
Encoder Platforms;
Classic MacOS, Windows
Decoder Platforms:
Classic MacOS, MacOSX, Windows
Block Size:
16
Automatic Keyframes?
Yes