Also unlike Cinepak and TrueMotion S, the compression used the same Y'CbCr 4:2:0 colorspace as the ITU's H.261 and ISO's MPEG-1.

Intel produced several different versions of the codec between 1993 and 2000, based on very different underlying mathematics and having different features.

Decoding complexity was significantly lower than with contemporary MPEG codecs (H.261, MPEG-1 Part 2).

[4] The codec was highly asymmetrical, meaning that it took much more computation to encode a video stream than to decode it.

[7] It was based on wavelet transforms[8] and included novel features such as chroma-keyed transparency and hot spot support.

The format was never officially documented but later reverse engineered to allow for third-party decoders.

Official Indeo 5 decoders exist for Microsoft Windows, the classic Mac OS, BeOS R5 and the XAnim player on Unix.

[18] The codec was originally licensed from Intel and Microsoft likely do not have the source code that would be required to fix the vulnerabilities.