What is video encoding and how does video compression technology work?
In order to fit all the information necessary to reproduce broadcast quality video on a single disc, it is necessary to be clever about how much, and what type, of data is stored on the disc. MPEG-2 is a type of video compression system that takes a digital video signal and discards certain types of information in the signal and records the left over information, all the while retaining enough information about the discarded data to reconstruct the original signal when the compressed signal is decoded. Since a special decoder is required to view the video signal, the process of creating that compressed signal is often referred to as encoding.
