Comparison of Video Compression Standards

In order to ensure compatibility among video codecs from different manufacturers and applications and to simplify the development of new applications, intensive efforts have been undertaken in recent years to define digital video standards Over the past decades, digital video compression technologies have become an integral part of the way we create, communicate and consume visual information. Digital video communication can be found today in many application sceneries such as broadcast services over satellite and terrestrial channels, digital video storage, wires and wireless conversational services and etc. The data quantity is very large for the digital video and the memory of the storage devices and the bandwidth of the transmission channel are not infinite, so it is not practical for us to store the full digital video without processing. For instance, we have a 720 x 480 pixels per frame,30 frames per second, total 90 minutes full color video, then the full data quantity of this video is about 167.96 G bytes. Thus, several video compression standards, techniques and algorithms had been developed to reduce the data quantity and provide the acceptable quality as possible as can. Thus they often represent an optimal compromise between performance and complexity. This paper describes the main features of video compression standards, discusses the emerging standards and presents some of its main characteristics.