Multimedia Data and Its Encoding

The rapid development of digital communication technology in the areas of diversity and performance is ongoing—with no end in sight. The trend toward the integration of classic media continues. Verbal communication and data transmission have now become inseparable in modern mobile networks. The debut of digital technology has made it no longer necessary to distinguish between different types of media, such as text, graphic, audio or video. Encoded and in digital form, they all take the same shape of an extremely long series of zeros and ones and can be transferred indiscriminately via the same medium. In order to convert this stream of 0 s and 1 s back to its original media expression, methods and procedures of encoding and decoding are necessary. This task is taken on by powerful computers, which in the future will appear less in the form of a standard monitor and keyboard and more as an integrated system component of nearly all everyday devices. Today the computer is the window to the digital world and functions as an integrative communication medium. It allows multimedia data communication via the standard interface of the World Wide Web (WWW) with its simple and intuitive user interface—the browser. In the following chapters, we will take a closer look at the encoding of multimedia data. We will also examine the data formats developed for its transmission through the digital network and in the WWW. The most important media formats for audio, image and video data will be our focus.