ITU-T Video Coding Standards

Standards define a common language that different parties can use, so that they can communicate with one another. Standards are thus, a prerequisite to effective communication. Video coding standards define the bitstream syntax, the language that the encoder and the decoder use to communicate. Besides defining the bitstream syntax, video coding standards are also required to be efficient, in that they should support good compression algorithms as well as allow the efficient implementation of the encoder and decoder.