Last update : January 30, 2013
FOURCC is short for “four character code” – an identifier for a video codec, compression format, color or pixel format used in media files. Another way to write FOURCC is 4CC. To find out which FOURCC’s are used within a media file, you need to use an application specialized to open and inspect the media file. Gspot, MediaInfo and ACIcodec are some of the tools supporting FOURCC.

A list of a few hundred video-codecs is available at the FOURCC website, a list of RGB- and YUV-pixel formats is available at the same site.

For audio codecs it is not FOURCC’s that is used, but rather audio tags, or an audio identifier – that identifies one specific audio codec or one type of audio compression scheme. An audio tag is an integer decimal value, often specified as a HEX value.

A great website about video- and audio-codecs is MovieCodec Forums/Downloads.