Summary

Video is becoming more and more popular for a large variety of applications and networks. Internet and wireless video, especially, has become part of our daily lives. However, despite many advances in terms of bandwidth and capacity enhancements in different networks, the data transmission rate will always be a scarce resource due to physical limitations, especially for high quality high bit rate applications. Therefore, good compression is as important as ever. Furthermore, real-time delivery of multimedia data is required for several application scenarios, such as conversational applications, streaming, broadcast, or video-on-demand services. Under such real-time constraints, unfortunately the Quality-of-Service (QoS) available in current and next generation networks is in general not sufficient to guarantee error-free delivery to all receivers. Therefore, in addition to the capability of easy integration into existing and future networks, video codecs must provide means of dealing with various transmission impairments. In communication environments, standardized solutions are desirable at terminals to ensure compatibility. That is why video coding standards such as MPEG-4 and H.264/AVC have become popular and attractive for numerous network en-vironments and application scenarios. These standards, like numerous previous standards and more recent standards such as VCI, use a hybrid coding approach, namely Motion Compensated Prediction (MCP). MCP is combined with trans-form coding of the residual. We will focus on MCP-coded video in the remainder of this chapter and mainly concentrate on tools and features integrated in the latest video coding standard H.264/AVC [19,45] and its test model software JM.