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Variable Bit Rate
Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows a higher bitrate (and therefore more storage space) to be allocated to the more complex segments of media files while less space is allocated to less complex segments. The average of these rates can be calculated to produce an average bitrate for the file. MP3, WMA and AAC audio files can optionally be encoded in VBR, while Opus and Vorbis are encoded in VBR by default. Variable bit rate encoding is also commonly used on MPEG-2 video, MPEG-4 Part 2 video (Xvid, DivX, etc.), MPEG-4 Part 10/H.264 video, Theora, Dirac and other video compression formats. Additionally, variable rate encoding is inherent in lossless compression schemes such as FLAC and Apple Lossless. Advantages and disadvantages of VBR The advantages of VBR are that it prod ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Telecommunications
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that feasible with the human voice, but with a similar scale of expediency; thus, slow systems (such as postal mail) are excluded from the field. The transmission media in telecommunication have evolved through numerous stages of technology, from beacons and other visual signals (such as smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs), to electrical cable and electromagnetic radiation, including light. Such transmission paths are often divided into communication channels, which afford the advantages of multiplexing multiple concurrent communication sessions. ''Telecommunication'' is often used in its plural form. Other examples of pre-modern long-distance communication included audio messages, such as coded drumb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MPEG-4 Part 10
Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers . It supports resolutions up to and including 8K UHD. The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (i.e., half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. This was achieved with features such as a reduced-complexity integer discrete cosine transform (integer DCT), variable block-size segmentation, and multi-picture inter-picture prediction. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Codecs
A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or data stream, and hence is a type of codec. ''Endec'' is a portmanteau of encoder/decoder. A coder or encoder encodes a data stream or a signal for transmission or storage, possibly in encrypted form, and the decoder function reverses the encoding for playback or editing. Codecs are used in videoconferencing, streaming media, and video editing applications. History In the mid-20th century, a codec was a device that coded analog signals into digital form using pulse-code modulation (PCM). Later, the name was also applied to software for converting between digital signal formats, including companding functions. Examples An audio codec converts analog audio signals into digital signals for transmission or encodes them for storage. A receiv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
Adaptive bitrate streaming is a technique used in streaming multimedia over computer networks. While in the past most video or audio streaming technologies utilized streaming protocols such as RTP with RTSP. Today's adaptive streaming technologies are almost exclusively based on HTTP and designed to work efficiently over large distributed HTTP networks such as the Internet. It works by detecting a user's bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time, adjusting the quality of the media stream accordingly. It requires the use of an encoder which encodes a single source media (video or audio) at multiple bit rates. The player clientDASH at ITEC, VLC Plugin, DASHEncoder and Dataset by C. Mueller, S. Lederer, C. Timmerer switches between streaming the different encodings depending on available resources. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constant Bitrate
Constant bitrate (CBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bitrate. When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be consumed is constant. CBR is useful for streaming multimedia content on limited capacity channels since it is the maximum bit rate that matters, not the average, so CBR would be used to take advantage of all of the capacity. CBR is not optimal for storing data as it may not allocate enough data for complex sections (resulting in degraded quality); and if it maximizes quality for complex sections, it will waste data on simple sections. The problem of not allocating enough data for complex sections could be solved by choosing a high bitrate to ensure that there will be enough bits for the entire encoding process, though the size of the file at the end would be proportionally larger. Most coding schemes such as Huffman coding or run-length en ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Average Bitrate
In telecommunications, average bitrate (ABR) refers to the average amount of data transferred per unit of time, usually measured per second, commonly for digital music or video. An MP3 file, for example, that has an average bit rate of 128 kbit/s transfers, on average, 128,000 bits every second. It can have higher bitrate and lower bitrate parts, and the average bitrate for a certain timeframe is obtained by dividing the number of bits used during the timeframe by the number of seconds in the timeframe. Bitrate is not reliable as a standalone measure of audio or video quality, since more efficient compression methods use lower bitrates to encode material at a similar quality. Average bitrate can also refer to a form of variable bitrate (VBR) encoding in which the encoder will try to reach a target average bitrate or file size while allowing the bitrate to vary between different parts of the audio or video. As it is a form of variable bitrate, this allows more complex portions of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bitrate
In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction with an SI prefix such as kilo (1 kbit/s = 1,000 bit/s), mega (1 Mbit/s = 1,000 kbit/s), giga (1 Gbit/s = 1,000 Mbit/s) or tera (1 Tbit/s = 1,000 Gbit/s). The non-standard abbreviation bps is often used to replace the standard symbol bit/s, so that, for example, 1 Mbps is used to mean one million bits per second. In most computing and digital communication environments, one byte per second (symbol: B/s) corresponds to 8 bit/s. Prefixes When quantifying large or small bit rates, SI prefixes (also known as metric prefixes or decimal prefixes) are used, thus: Binary prefixes are sometimes used for bit rates. The International Standard ( IEC 80000-13) specifies different ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Streaming Media
Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the traditional media delivery systems are either inherently ''streaming'' (e.g. radio, television) or inherently ''non-streaming'' (e.g. books, videotape, audio CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or poor buffering of the content, and users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content. With the use of buffering of the content for just a few seconds in advance of playback, the quality can be much improved. Livestreaming is the real-time delivery of co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apple Lossless
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. After initially keeping it proprietary from its inception in 2004, in late 2011 Apple made the codec available open source and royalty-free. Traditionally, Apple has referred to the codec as ''Apple Lossless'', though more recently it has begun to use the abbreviated term ''ALAC'' when referring to the codec. Codec ALAC supports up to 8 channels of audio at 16, 20, 24 and 32 bit depth with a maximum sample rate of 384 kHz. ALAC data is frequently stored within an MP4 container with the filename extension ''.m4a''. This extension is also used by Apple for lossy AAC audio data in an MP4 container (same container, different audio encoding). The codec can also be used by the .CAF file type container, though this is much less common. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FLAC
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data. FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC has support for metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking. History Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson. The bit-stream format was frozen when FLAC entered beta stage with the release of version 0.5 of the reference implementation on 15 January 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001. On 29 January 2003, the Xiph.Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lossless Compression
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes). By operation of the pigeonhole principle, no lossless compression algorithm can efficiently compress all possible data. For this reason, many different algorithms exist that are designed either with a specific type of input data in mind or with specific assumptions about what kinds of redundancy the uncompressed data are likely to contain. Therefore, compression ratios tend to be stronger on human- and machine-readable documents and code in comparison to entropic binary data (random bytes). Lossless data compression is used in many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dirac (codec)
Dirac is an open and royalty-free video compression format, specification and system developed by BBC Research & Development. Schrödinger and dirac-research (formerly just called "Dirac") are open and royalty-free software implementations (video codecs) of Dirac. Dirac format aims to provide high-quality video compression for Ultra HDTV and beyond, and as such competes with existing formats such as H.264 and VC-1. The specification was finalised in January 2008, and further developments are only bug fixes and constraints. In September of that year, version 1.0.0 of an I-frame only subset known as ''Dirac Pro'' was released and has since been standardised by the SMPTE as ''VC-2''. Version 2.2.3 of the full Dirac specification, including motion compensation and inter-frame coding, was issued a few days later. Dirac Pro was used internally by the BBC to transmit HDTV pictures at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The format implementations are named in honour of the theoretical phy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
