Hi and welcome to my video compression pages.

These pages are part of a seminar I gave in the spring of 2002, in an effort to talk about something that would bore neither astronomers nor condensed matter physicists. Compression of data (text, images, audio and video) is something that most of us have been taking for granted, so much so that most of us do not even know that the average image file that we view on our screens or the television show that we are watching has actually been compressed to reduce file size and bandwidth! It was therefore fun to work on this topic because I learnt a lot about file compression.

(Like the animation? Well, thats about the only animation you will see on this website. It took me an hour to do that using Animation Shop.... not bad, eh?)

Most of this stuff uses only basic physics and there are no equations involved (except for the Discrete Cosine Transform or DCT, which is not so complicated for physicists!), so it should be easy to understand, and if you have fifteen or twenty minutes free, its also something interesting to know about your everyday .mpeg or .mp3 files, so read on!

Go to the next page, or use one of the following quick links:

Main Page
Motivation For Compression - Some True Stories
A Brief History of Compression (heheh - brief, compress... get it?)
Requirements From Any Compression Algorithm
Data Compression Fundamentals
Some Compression Techniques
Video Compression Techniques: The MPEG-1 Standard
The Future: MPEG-4 And MPEG-7
Related Links
 
 
 

Contact Me: sundar@pha.jhu.edu
Copyright © Sundar Srinivasan 2002