Microsoft Video 1
Microsoft Video 1 was an early lossy video compression codec released with Video for Windows 1.0 in November 1992. It used a vector quantization method called MotiVE, licensed from Media Vision.
It compresses video by dividing each frame into 4x4 blocks and encoding them in three ways: skip, 2-color, or 8-color. Skip copies the previous frame content. In 2-color mode, a 4x4 block uses two colors with 1 bit per pixel to pick between them. In 8-color mode, the same idea is applied to 2x2 blocks. Colors can be stored in an 8-bit palette or a 15-bit RGB space. The color data uses a forward adaptive codebook with two entries.
Key frames could be spaced at least every 15 frames, giving compression ratios from about 10:1 up to 100:1.
Initially software-only, a 1993 hardware version was released for capture cards (MVV251 for capture and MVV351 for on-die 16-bit compression). The Pro Movie Spectrum ISA board could capture video in raw and Video 1 formats with hardware processing.
Video 1 helped popularize multimedia PCs in the early 1990s because it shipped with the first Video for Windows release and produced smaller files than competing codecs like Indeo and RLE, while being easier to decode on entry-level PCs. However, as CPUs grew more powerful and newer codecs emerged, Video 1 showed macroblocking artifacts and came to be seen as outdated by the early 2000s.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 00:57 (CET).