A video format describes how one device sends video pictures to another device, such as the way that a DVD player sends pictures to a television, or a computer to a monitor. More formally, the video format describes the sequence and structure of frames that create the moving video image. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... In film, video production, animation, and related fields, a frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture. ...

Video formats are commonly known in the domain of commercial broadcast and consumer devices; most notably to date, these are the analog video formats of NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. However, video formats also describe the digital equivalents of the commercial formats, the aging custom military uses of analog video (such as RS-170 and RS-343), the increasingly important video formats used with computers, and even such offbeat formats such as color field sequential. The references in this article would be clearer with a different and/or consistent style of citation, footnoting or external linking. ... Television encoding systems by nation. ... SECAM, also written SÉCAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for Sequential Color with Memory), is an analog color television system first used in France. ... Digital video is a type of video recording system that works by using a digital, rather than analog, representation of the video signal. ... The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) is an international body, founded in the late 1980s by NEC Home Electronics and eight other video display adapter manufacturers. ...

Video formats were originally designed for display devices such as a CRTs. However, because other kinds of displays have common source material and because video formats enjoy wide adoption and have convenient organization, video formats are a common means to describe the structure of displayed visual information for a variety of graphical output devices. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into output device. ... Cathode ray tube employing electromagnetic focus and deflection Cutaway rendering of a color CRT: 1. ... A graphical output device is a computer output device that produces visual material. ...

Common organization of video formats

A video format describes a rectangular image carried within an envelope containing information about the image. Although video formats vary greatly in organization, there is a common taxonomy:

• A frame can consist of two or more fields, sent separately but in order, (How about just "sent sequentially") that assemble together (or "are assembled," but this is misleading. They are not "assembled" but displayed over time, unless one is "de-interlacing" a video sequence.) to form a rectangular picture. This kind of assembly is known as interlace. (Actually, the recording method is as "interlacing.") An interlaced video frame distinguishes itself from the progressive scan frame where the entire frame sends as a single intact entity. (Distinguishes ITSELF? Or "is distinguished from" a non-interlaced frame? The original text here was written by a novice. It's not a "Progressive scan" frame but a "non-interlaced" frame. "Progressive scanning" is a term for the recording and display method for non-interlaced video.)
• A frame consists of a rectangular series of lines, sometimes known as scan lines. (sometimes?) [Scan] Llines have a regular and consistent length in order to produce a rectangular image. To achieve this, in analog formats, a line lasts for a given period of time; in digital formats, the line consists of a given number of pixels. (This guy's logic is totally backwards. It's not "To achieve this" but actually, "This is because..." I think the original author here doesn't understand cause-and-effect relationships in the development of technology nor the history of this technology's development. For better information, see the NTSC, PAL, and SECAM pages.) When a device sends a frame, the video format usually specifies that devices sends each line independently from any others and that all lines are sent in top-to-bottom order. (Usually? Lines are not sent individually, but because of the time interval in analog video, the line breaks as a regular time. See Blanking Interval. Line, frame, and field separation in analog video are based on time. The original timings were based on electrical current cycles.)

• The following has nothing to do with standard video formats, but with encoding frames for compression, such as MPEG compression. The original author confused the two. Standard video, which was analog based, was all sequential. The output from a compressed video playback still adheres to sequence, even if that video is no longer decoded to match NTSC/PAL/SECAM standards. The comments below have more to do with data handling for compression. The original author did not make that clear. Digitized video (raw samples) follows analog sequence and then "DV" (digital video) has some compression, but not much. The frame re-ordering written below is in reference to heavy compression. The original author may be confusing the use of fields in interlaced video with frame order for compressed/non-compressed video. As above, a frame may be split into fields--odd and even (by line "numbers") or upper and lower, respectively. In NTSC, the lower field comes first, then the upper field, and that's the whole frame. I think this blurb is about compressed formats, which are not straight video "formats" themselves, but data encoding standards. The basics of a format are Aspect Ratio, Frame Rate, and Interlacing with field order if applicable: Video formats use a sequence of frames in a specified order. In some formats, a single frame is independent of any other (such as those used in computer video formats), so the sequence is only one frame. (Yep, these are compression schemes, not video formats.) In other video formats (such as the Bruch sequence in PAL), frames have an ordered position. (The Bruch Sequence is not a format itself, but a technology used for a particular format standard.) Individual frames within a sequence typically have similar construction. However, depending on it position in the sequence, frames may vary small elements within them to represent additional information. (What he's trying to say here is that compression, mainly MPEG-2 compression in his example, may eliminate the information that is redundant frame-to-frame in order to reduce the data size, preserving the information relating to changes between frames. See Video Compression for a real explanation and note the I-frame or Key-frame explanation.

Interlace is a technique of improving the picture quality of a video signal on CRT devices without consuming any extra bandwidth. ... Progressive scan Progressive or noninterlaced scanning is any method for displaying, storing or transmitting moving images in which the lines of each frame are drawn in sequence. ... The references in this article would be clearer with a different and/or consistent style of citation, footnoting or external linking. ... Television encoding systems by nation. ... SECAM, also written SÉCAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for Sequential Color with Memory), is an analog color television system first used in France. ... Walter Bruch (March 2, 1908 - May 5, 1990) was a German engineer, famous for inventing the PAL color television system at Telefunken in the early 1960s. ... Video compression refers to making a digital video signal use less data, without noticeably reducing the quality of the picture. ...

Analog video formats

• NTSC
• PAL
• SECAM

The references in this article would be clearer with a different and/or consistent style of citation, footnoting or external linking. ... Television encoding systems by nation. ... SECAM, also written SÉCAM (Séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for Sequential Color with Memory), is an analog color television system first used in France. ...

Blanking region

The video format consists of more information than the visible content of the frame. Preceding and following the image are lines and pixels containing synchronization information or a time delay. This surrounding margin is known as a blanking interval; the horizontal and vertical front porch and back porch are the building blocks of the blanking interval. In television broadcasting, the front porch is a brief (about 1. ... Back Porch refers to the portion in each scan line of a video signal between the end (rising edge) of the horizontal sync pulse and the start of active video. ...

Digital Video Formats

These are MPEG2 based terrestrial broadcast video fomats MP2, also known as Musicam, is a short form of MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 (not MPEG-2), and it is also used as a file extension for files containing audio data of this type. ...

• ATSC Standards
• DVB
• ISDB

These are strictly the format of the video itself, and not for the modulation used for transmission. ATSC Standards document a digital television format intend to replace (in the United States) the analog NTSC television system (NTSC is used mostly in North America and Japan). ... Official DVB logo, found on compliant devices DVB, short for Digital Video Broadcasting, is a suite of internationally accepted open standards for digital television. ... Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) is the digital television (DTV) and digital audio broadcasting (DAB) format. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... In telecommunications, modulation is the process of varying a periodic waveform, i. ... In communications, transmission is the act of transmitting electrical messages (and the associated phenonomena of radiant energy that pass through media). ...

See List of codecs The following is a list of codecs. ...