A Brief History of Video Coding

Almost everyone in the industrialized world uses video compression many times each day. Whether you’re watching Oprah on TV, funny clips on YouTube, Disney on DVD or homemade movies of your family, all video storage and delivery mechanisms rely heavily on compression technology. As early as 1929, Ray Davis Kell described a form of video compression and was granted a patent for it. He wrote, “It has been customary in the past to transmit successive complete images of the transmitted picture. [...] In accordance with this invention, this difficulty is avoided by transmitting only the difference between successive images of the object.” Although it would be many years before this technique would actually be used in practice, it is still a cornerstone of many video compression standards today. We’ll take a trip down memory lane in this article, describing video compression standards over the years, after a brief introduction to television signals in general. We’ll describe the challenges in designing video subsystems that support these video standards and conclude with a description of the ARC Video 401 Subsystem, highlighting how it addresses the challenging video market demands.