Video is the technology of capturing, recording, processing, transmitting, and reconstructing moving pictures, typically using celluloid film, electronic signals, or digital media, primarily for viewing on television or computer monitors.
The term video (from the Latin for "I see") commonly refers to several storage formats for moving pictures: digital video formats, including DVD, QuickTime, and MPEG-4; and analog videotapes, including VHS and Betamax. Video can be recorded and transmitted in various physical media: in celluloid film when recorded by mechanical cameras, in PAL or NTSC electric signals when recorded by video cameras, or in MPEG-4 or DV digital media when recorded by digital cameras.
Quality of video essentially depends on the capturing method and storage used. Digital television (DTV) is a relatively recent format with higher quality than earlier television formats and has become a standard for television video. (See List of digital television deployments by country.)
3D-video, digital video in three dimensions, premiered at the end of 20th century. Six or eight cameras with realtime depth measurement are typically used to capture 3D-video streams. The format of 3D-video is fixed in MPEG-4 Part 16 Animation Framework eXtension (AFX).
In the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the term video is often used informally to refer to both video recorders and video cassettes; the meaning is normally clear from the context.
In progressive scan systems, each frame includes all of the scan lines. The result is a much higher perceived resolution.
A procedure known as deinterlacing can be used for converting an interlaced stream, such as analog, DVD, or satellite, to be processed by progressive scan devices, such as TFT TV-sets, projectors, and plasma panels. Deinterlacing inevitably decreases video quality.
The size of a video image is measured in pixels for digital video or horizontal scan lines for analog video. Standard-definition television (SDTV) is specified as 720/704/640×480i60 for NTSC and 768/720×576i50 for PAL or SECAM resolution. New high-definition televisions (HDTV) are capable of resolutions up to 1920×1080p60, i.e. 1920 pixels per scan line by 1080 scan lines, progressive, at 60 frames per second.
Video resolution for 3D-video is measured in voxels (volume picture element, representing a value in three dimensional space). For example 512×512×512 voxels resolution, now used for simple 3D-video, can be displayed even on some PDAs.
Aspect ratio describes the dimensions of video screens and video picture elements. The screen aspect ratio of a traditional television screen is 4:3, or 1.33:1. High definition televisions use an aspect ratio of 16:9, or about 1.78:1. The aspect ratio of a full 35 mm film frame with soundtrack (also known as "Academy standard") is around 1.37:1.
Pixels on computer monitors are usually square, but pixels used in digital video have non-square aspect ratios, such as those used in the PAL and NTSC variants of the CCIR 601 digital video standard, and the corresponding anamorphic widescreen formats.
Color model name describes the video color representation. YIQ is used in NTSC television. It corresponds closely to the YUV scheme used in PAL television and the YDbDr scheme used by SECAM television.
The number of distinct colours that can be represented by a pixel depends on the number of bits per pixel (bpp). A common way to reduce the number of bits per pixel in digital video is by chroma subsampling (e.g. 2:2#4:4:4, 2:2#4:2:2, 2:0#4:2:0).
The subjective video quality of a video processing system may be evaluated as follows:
Many subjective video quality methods are described in the ITU-T recommendation BT.500. One of the standardized method is the Double Stimulus Impairment Scale (DSIS). In DSIS, each expert views an unimpaired reference video followed by an impaired version of the same video. The expert then rates the impaired video using a scale ranging from "impairments are imperceptible" to "impairments are very annoying".
Variable bit rate (VBR) is a strategy to maximize the visual video quality and minimize the bit rate. On fast motion scenes, a variable bit rate uses more bits than it does on slow motion scenes of similar duration yet achieves a consistent visual quality. For real-time and non-buffered video streaming when the available bandwidth is fixed, e.g. in videoconferencing delivered on channels of fixed bandwidth, a constant bit rate (CBR) must be used.
| Video Display Standards | Video Connection Standards |
| Analog Tape Formats (See Analog television) | Digital Tape Formats (See Digital video) |
| Optical Disc Storage Formats | Digital Encoding Formats |
Film and video technology | Digital television | High-definition television
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