Data Center Fundamentals

Appendix C. Video Encoding Mechanisms

The coder/decoder (codec) defines how the original media is encoded. Encoding is required to reduce the amount of data necessary to represent the video/audio. This, in turn, reduces the amount of bandwidth necessary to stream video/audio on the network.

The secret to encoding involves removing the redundant information present in a single frame or across multiple frames. As an example, a single frame representing a blue sky is made of the repetition of the same pattern, a blue pixel. A good encoding mechanism can represent this frame as the color code followed by the number of times that it needs to be repeated. This reduces the number of bytes necessary to store the encoded information. This is an example ...