Internet Still Image and Video Formats

Abstract

Nowadays it is hard to find a website without images. Even buttons and layout elements of a website consist of small bitmaps. Using images in the internet has become possible as there are sophisticated compression algorithms to keep the sizes of the images as small as possible. Video clips are still rare to be found on typical websites, but the usage of video is increasing. However – opposed to still images – up to now there is no commonly accepted video coding standard that has been incorporated into web-browsing applications. In addition the bandwidth that is required for the transmission of high quality videos – larger than the size of a matchbox – is still too high for most users having access to the internet with moderate bandwidth only (e.g. a modem). This chapter introduces some basic facts about images and videos. It explains the essential ideas of image and video compression techniques. Standards and quasi-standards are described and their features will be discussed.