Codec
Codec, a portmanteau of coder/decoder, refers to that can encode and/or decodes a kind of thing.
This can be either hardware or software.
- 'video codec' often refers to software
- and is a term common to talking about video playback
- the term is more restrained, to e.g. hardware designers
- 'image codec' is software
- the term is even more restrained, e.g. when people want to compare image compression
- you might argue for 'text codec' but we call those text encodings, or serialization, instead, though some do
In communications, endec is similar.
For example, in IrDA, encdec basically refers to the part between UART and the infrared part.