20 years of progress in video compression – From MPEG-1 to MPEG-H HEVC. General view on the path of video coding development

Abstract

Compression of moving images has opened unprecedented opportunities of transmission and storage of digital video. Extraordinary performance of today’s video codecs is a result of tens of years of work on the development of methods of data encoding. This paper is an attempt to show this history of development. It highlights the history of individual algorithms of data encoding as well as the evolution of video compression technologies as a whole. With the development of successive technologies also functionalities of codecs were evolving, which make also the topic of the paper. The paper ends the attempt of authors’ forecasting about the future evolution of video compression technologies.