The MovIm video codec

The MovIm video codec is developed since late 2018 by Reto Kromer, who first presented it publicly in 2019. It is specifically designed for both conservation and restoration purposes, and is actually an enhancement and the replacement of the YCoCg and MSMI video codecs he developed from early 2014 and 2017 on. This work has been directly inspired by a discussion he had with Tommy Aschenbach at the AMIA Conference 2018. However, he wishes to acknowledge also the inspiration given in various occasions by Claudio Weidmann, Jim Lindner, Carl Eugen Hoyos, Peter Bubestinger-Steindl, Jérôme Martinez and Michael Niedermayer. And in 2022, Michal Cohen became co-author.

The MovIm package consists in the libmovim C library, implementing the MovIm video codec, and its associated movimenc, movimdec and movimplay utilities, as well as the openmovim Bash command-line interface to encode, decode, play and analyse virtually any moving image. The package is released under a 3-Clause BSD License and is provided “as is” without warranty or support of any kind. The source code will become freely available, as soon as a public beta can be released.

The library is used for both to store the digitisation raw data and to process the data during the image restoration.

Documentation

The man pages are available as PDF files:

• libmovim, the reference library implementing the MovIm video codec
• movimdec, the reference MovIm decoder
• movimenc, the reference MovIm encoder
• movimplay, the reference MovIm player
• openmovim, a command-line interface to encode, decode, play and analyse moving images

The Change Log file is available as well on this website.

We are working on the following additional documentation:

• the MovIm specification
• the plugin for the Diamant-Film restoration software

Beta Release

Our clients can install, test and actually use a private beta, which comes with a few short test files. It is necessary to connect into our extranet to download the package. As usual, directions are recalled in the README.txt file: run the following three classic commands in the Terminal:

cd movim-2025-06-29
./configure
make install

The MovIm video codec’s library libmovim was successfully tested on various modern x86-64 and AArch64 architectures, running under the following operating systems:

• Linux: Debian 12.11 and 11.11; Ubuntu 25.04, 24.04.2 LTS, 22.04.5 LTS and 20.04.6 LTS; Slackware 15.0
• Macintosh: macOS 15.5, 14.7.6 and 13.7.6
• Windows: 11 version 24H2, 23H2 and 22H2, running Terminal or Subsystem for Linux

2025-07-02