Indeo is a video codec developed by Intel Corporation back in the early '90s and sold to Ligos Corporation in the year 2000, which still distributes it. The Indeo codecs have been a popular solution for video and audio in CD-ROM games, computer training titles, encyclopedias and online media. Ligos continues to distribute Indeo software for legacy applications still requiring its use in Windows 95, 98, ME, XP and NT/2000 operating systems.
Indeo codecs are not compatible with the Windows Vista operating system, or the upcoming Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft. At one time, Indeo was the only codec to be supported in both Microsoft Windows, Apple Computer Inc.'s QuickTime movie player and the IBM machines available at the time. Several versions of the Indeo codec were developed by Intel until it eventually sold off the technology to Ligos.
Indeo Video Interactive had some more advanced features that were marketed toward the video games industry, then experiencing rapid growth. Indeo was buried with the rise of MPEG codecs, but it is still used in some video cutscenes. It remained a proprietary codec even when it was gaining considerable ground in the mid 90's.
It took much more computational power to encode a stream with Indeo than to decode it, so at the time an add-in card was often required for hardware acceleration to encode video, but the video could be decoded easily by a personal computer at the time.
