The term video coding identifies the process of compressing (i.e. compacting or condensing) a digital video sequence into a smaller number of bits.
The process of compression is definitely necessary for practical storage and transmission of digital video: just to understand this, it is sufficient to figure that an uncompressed (or ‘raw’) digital TV-quality video typically requires a bitrate of approximately 216 Mbits for 1 second.
The process of compression involves a complementary pair of systems, an encoder, with the role of compressor, and a decoder, with the role of decompressor.
The encoder converts the source data into a compressed form prior to transmission or storage and the decoder converts the compressed form back into a representation of the original video data.
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