Yong Qiu Liu's Web Page--Video codecs

Introduction of multimedia codecs

3. Video codecs

Video compression is perhaps the most important topic in video coding. Highly efficient, robust and flexible digital video compression and encoding techniques are required in many special communication areas such as videoconference and digital television broadcasting. To solve the problem of high data rates, real-time constraints and bandwidth limits, the integration of motion video as an integral part of multimedia environment is one of the most attractive and highlighted projects.

There are many methods that have been developed for audio and video codecs. The requirement is to get a maximal compression ratio and, at the same time, keep the perceived quality of the reproduction as high as possible and finally to have algorithms that have a well bounded latency or time delay.

Of course, these three aspects cannot be satisfied simultaneously. What researchers are looking for is a suitable point of balance between these three aspects.

The Following are some of the standard codecs used for audio or video transmission. The video compression standards currently in widely use are H.261, H.263 and MPEG which were set by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Moving Picture Experts Group respectively. These video codec methods provide various ways to compress/decompress motion pictures for their transmission to allow users to participate in a conference, sharing living videos, regardless of their platform[14].

Last update April 1, 2002