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OMS Video

Video compression

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated October 28, 2025

OMS Video is an open, royalty-free video compression specification that was under development by Sun Microsystems's Open Media Commons as part of the Open Media Stack. It defines a video decoder and the associated bitstream syntax. It is intended for delivery, storage and playback of video streams.

It was announced on April 11, 2008. The latest version of OMS Video Specification is 0.91, released on June 9, 2009.

01OMS Video design

OMS Video is based on an updated version of the H.261 codec as some of the patents on it have now expired. Vorbis is planned for use as the audio codec.

Watch videos about OMS VideoExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “OMS Video”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Related topics

H.261

H.261 is an ITU-T video compression standard, first ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group.

Vorbis

Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder for lossy audio compression, libvorbis.

Data compression

In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless.