There are plenty of familiar examples of technological marvels. Cramming billions of transistors into a computer chip is pretty amazing, for instance. But did you know just how cool streaming video is?into the nuts and bolts of video compression and the details are genuinely fascinating even if you already had a rough idea of how it all works.
The solution, of course, is video compression. Petersen provides a whistle stop tour of the five key components of compression. First up is colour downsampling, which relies on the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to luminance than colour and also more sensitive to some colours than others.That means you can effectively discard some colour data without changing the subjective appearance of an image. That buys you up to two times compression.
Finally, there's symbol encoding, which essentially involves using abbreviated coding for frequently recurring patterns in the binary image data itself. That can achieve up to two times further compression. At 8-bit colour, regular SDR 1080p would require roughly 185MB/s, while full 4K HDR would clock up a staggering 2GB per second. All pretty mind numbing numbers.