A bitstream format is the format of the data found in a
stream
A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a stream ...
of bits used in a
digital communication or
data storage
Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are conside ...
application. The term typically refers to the data format of the output of an encoder, or the data format of the input to a decoder when using
data compression.
Processing
Standardized
interoperability specifications such as the
video coding standards produced by the
MPEG and the
ITU-T, and the audio coding standards produced by the MPEG, often specify only the
bitstream format and the decoding process. This allows encoder implementations to use any methods whatsoever that produce bitstreams which conform to the specified bitstream format.
Normally, decoding of a bitstream can be initiated without having to start from the beginning of a
file, or the beginning of the data transmission. Some bitstreams are designed for this to occur, for example by using indexes or
key frame
In animation and filmmaking, a key frame (or keyframe) is a drawing or shot that defines the starting and ending points of a smooth transition. These are called ''frames'' because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film ...
s.
Uses of ''bit stream decoders'' (BSD):
*
Graphics processing unit (GPU)
*
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
*
Unified Video Decoder (UVD) the video decoding bit-stream technology from ATI Technologies/AMD
*
PureVideo the video decoding bit-stream technology from Nvidia
*
Quick Sync Video the video decoding and encoding bit-stream technology from Intel
See also
*
Elementary stream
*
Stream processing
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bitstream Format
Data compression