CHAPTER 4

Technology Beyond the Standard

In order to better understand the implications of some of the items in the standard, this chapter will provide a bit of additional technical background. The material presented here cannot be considered to be complete, however. The selection of topics is based on many discussions and conversations about MPEG-4 with business-oriented professionals throughout recent years.

4.1. Why Do We Need Compression to Begin With?

Digitizing analog video signals expands physical bandwidth requirements. Physical transmission bandwidth or storage capacity is a natural resource that is scarce and thus expensive. This is where compression of digital data comes into play—to make transmission and storage of digital data economically ...

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