Distributed Video Coding is becoming more and more popular among the research community, because of its interesting theoretical contributions and because there are still many open problems waiting to be solved. This paper introduces the codec architecture and the associated tools adopted by DISCOVER (DIStributed COding for Video sERvices), a European project which has been devoted to the advancement of Distributed Video Coding for two years. Along with the general description and pointers to references with more detailed information, this paper also presents some of the results obtained with the DISCOVER codec. An extended performance analysis and the codec’s executable file are both publicly available on the project’s web site www.discoverdvc.org.