Every digital video you watch — Netflix, a Zoom call, a YouTube clip, the ad on a billboard — is fundamentally the same thing: a fast slideshow of still images. Each image (a frame) is stored as a grid of tiny coloured squares (pixels), and the player shows enough of them per second that your eyes stitch them into smooth motion.
What makes it "digital" is that every pixel's colour is stored as a number, not as a wave on a tape or a pattern on film. Numbers can be copied without loss, sent over the internet, and compressed by clever algorithms so a two-hour movie fits on your phone instead of on a stack of hard drives.
That simplicity hides a lot of choices that drive cost and quality: how many frames per second (24, 30, 60, 120), how big each frame is (resolution), how many bits describe each pixel's colour (bit-depth), which colours the system can show at all (color-space), and how aggressively the file is compressed (codec, bitrate). The rest of this glossary is essentially a vocabulary for those choices.
The book · Volume 1 of 7
Video Encoding: A Complete Guide to Video Compression — From Pixels and Color to H.264, HEVC, AV1, Quality Metrics, and AI
Digital video is a stream of frames made of pixel values, and every later choice about codecs, bitrate and colour starts from that model. Volume 1 starts with digital video itself: pixels and color, frame rates and resolution, sampling, and why raw video needs H.264, HEVC or AV1 compression to be practical. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Starting a digital video product and need the encoding basics decided right?
Tell us what you are building: we outline the formats, resolutions, frame rates and codec choices for your first release, with storage and bandwidth estimates. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
