e ought to be a reference implementation to test against, which
would at least allow you to prove your code is workable prior to 
experimenting with the other, utterly undocumented, compressors you may 
find.
</p><p>
In any case, particular multimedia types and compressors are identified
using a unique four-byte character code (normally referred to as <span class="i">FourCC</span>).
Since four bytes are used, the FourCC value can be held as a long value,
and translated to and from a character representation