¶ … H.261, H.263, MPEG-1, and MPEG-2 video coding standards in regard to Video Compression. The basis of this technology is founded on the idea of combining audio compression and video compression in order to create the concept of digital compression. When put together, these techniques literally revolutionized the way that audio and video data could be stored and/or transmitted electronically and more important, digitally. The new world order is dominated by the internet. One of the reasons for the overall success of the internet is that anyone can see and hear complete film clips from the war in Afghanistan on Yahoo News or they can choose to watch a Will Ferrell comedy movie in its entirety. The objective is to discuss the state of the technology and offering some insight into how the process of Video Compression works. There are many new vendors and significant amounts of research in this field of study and the technology will continue to improve.

Baseline

There is and there will continue to be great demand on the producers of Video Compression technology because of the likes of the Internet, MP3 Players, new cell phones like the iPhone, DVD players, HDTV and new digital television standards, and those cool handheld digital cameras. These new 'must have necessities' are each pushing for the industry for newer and faster methods of compressing audio and video data. The technology is based on the ideas and techniques of MPEGs or the Moving Picture Experts Group.

MPEGs, pronounced M-pegs, are a standard that has been used to program or code both audio and visual data into either binary or hexadecimal formats. Examples of this type of coding can be seen every time that someone goes on YouTube to watch movies, music videos or over on iTunes to buy digital music. This compressed information is transferred into the MPEG format with special software so that it can be more easily moved, sent or stored in or on digital technologies. There are clear advantages to using the MPEG format as compared to other video and audio coding techniques. One major advantage is that MPEG files are significantly smaller because they use such an intricate compression methodology.

Many countries, schools and scientific bodies...

MPEG and other digital compression techniques are classified by these standards. For example, ANSI or the American National Standards Institute in the United States or the ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, create and manage these standards on a global scale. The Internet and all of the new advancements in the technological fields occur quickly and easily because, like Henry Ford, standardization permits new and existing technologies to be created faster and more cost effectively when a single standard is accepted on a global scale.
Techniques & Vendors

MPEG, and other video compression techniques, work through the combined efforts of the hardware and software. The combination of hardware and software take data and convert it into the format that is understood by software programs. An example of a software program that can read the logical sequencing of data in an MPEG format might be the REAL player that is often on most PCs. The format has evolved so MPEG formatted data can also be identified by other naming extensions like: MPG, MP2, MP3, MP4, MP7 and MP21. Today, MP7 is the current standard and MP21 will be the standard in the future.

MPEG is used for movies and videos that need to contain sound bites, but there are other standards that may not require motion, sound or both. These standards include several other choices like: JPEG, DV or H26. "Discrete cosine transform is a lossy compression algorithm that samples an image at regular intervals, analyzes the frequency components present in the sample, and discards those frequencies which do not affect the image as the human eye perceives it. DCT is the basis of standards such as JPEG, MPEG, H.261, and H.263." (Unknown) It is important to note that even though they are different from MPEG standards, the concepts associated with standardized compression methodologies are the same. If comparing the code of a movie MPEG and a picture jpeg, they would look similar. "JPEG is a lossy compression technique used for full-color or gray-scale images, by exploiting the fact that the human eye will not notice small color changes." (Unknown)

The compression techniques are not patented or owned by any single vendor. Because…