Video compression - early history

Present day video codecs such as HEVC are based on fundamental concepts that go back a surprisingly long way. Key components such as motion compensated prediction, transform coding and entropy coding were developed in the decades before 1990.

I've written a short overview of the early days of video coding, when the building blocks were developed that would enable the emergence of mainstream digital video products in the 1990s. Click here to download the article, or download it from the Vcodex resources page here.

"En L'An 2000", early videophone concept, 1910