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The Sorenson codec first appeared in QuickTime 4, which was widely used for the first time at the release of the teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on March 11, 1999.
The specifications of the codec were not public, and for a long time the only way to play back Sorenson video was to use Apple's QuickTime player, or the MPlayer for Unix/Linux, which in turn piggy-backed Microsoft Windows DLL-files extracted from Apple's player.
Analysis and reimplementation by an anonymous FFmpeg developer revealed that the Sorenson codec was a tweaked variant of the H.264 standard. This codec is supported in FFmpeg's libavcodec library since version 0.4.7, released August 24, 2003.