A History of Video Coding and Video Coding Standards

Summary

This chapter traces the development of video coding from the early theoretical concepts, many of which were first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, through the first industry standards, the emergence of mass‐market applications, the rise of internet and mobile video, to the present day. It looks at when and how were the early concepts of video coding developed? and how did these concepts evolve into the well‐known block‐based video codec model? A video coding standard specifies a bitstream format for compressed video and a method of decoding the bitstream to produce a decoded video sequence. H.261 was the first of the industry standards for video coding to have an appreciable commercial impact. The chapter also looks at how did the video coding standards contribute to or influence the changing patterns of digital video usage, from television and DVDs to video streaming?