Overview: Video

Digital video combines picture content, timing, compression and color information that must survive the path to a display.

A picture can be sharp but stretched, correctly sized but juddery, or smoothly played with the wrong brightness. Those symptoms involve different properties of video. Resolution and geometry describe the picture's shape; timing describes its motion; coding and color describe how the stored signal becomes visible.

The topics below connect those properties to the work a player or Emby Server performs. HDR and tone mapping explain brightness and color adaptation, while scaling and spatial video address how pictures are reconstructed or arranged for presentation. Each branch supplies the vocabulary needed to investigate that part of the image.

  • How digital video represents moving pictures
    Digital video describes a sequence of pictures and the timing needed to display them as motion.

  • Picture geometry
    Picture geometry relates stored dimensions and orientation to the shape of the image shown on screen.

  • Frame timing and interlacing
    Frame timing and interlacing determine how picture samples become motion on a playback timeline.

  • Video compression
    Video compression represents pictures efficiently through coding choices, prediction and constraints on the resulting stream.

  • Video codecs
    Video codecs define coded-picture formats whose properties and implementation support influence playback compatibility.

  • Encoding and picture quality
    Encoding quality depends on rate allocation, encoder effort and the picture changes introduced by compression.

  • Color and pixel formats
    Color representation describes how picture components, sample precision and memory layouts carry a video signal.

  • Color standards and transfer functions
    Color standards and transfer functions define how encoded values relate to color and light.

  • High dynamic range (HDR)
    HDR video represents a wider range of light and color under defined capture, mastering and presentation conventions.

  • Tone mapping
    Tone mapping adapts a source's brightness representation to the useful range and characteristics of an output.

  • Scaling and image processing
    Video scaling and image processing reconstruct samples and alter picture detail for the intended presentation.

  • Stereoscopic and spatial video
    Stereoscopic and spatial video carry related views that must be reconstructed and presented in the intended viewing arrangement.