Before the mid-1990s, nearly all video was in analog form. Only then did forces like the advent of MPEG-2 compression, the proliferation of streaming media on the Internet, and the FCC's adoption of a Digital Television (DTV) standard create a "perfect storm" that brought the benefits of digital representation into the video world. These advantages over analog include better signal-to-noise performance, improved bandwidth utilization (fitting several digital video channels into each existing analog channel), and reduction in storage space through digital compression techniques.

At its root, digitizing video involves both sampling and quantizing the analog video signal. In the 2D context of a video frame, sampling entails dividing the image space, gridlike, into small regions and assigning relative amplitude values based on the intensities of color space components in each region. Note that analog video is already sampled vertically (discrete number of rows) and temporally (discrete number of frames per second).

Quantization is the process that determines these discrete amplitude values assigned during the sampling process. Eight-bit video is common in consumer applications, where a value of 0 is darkest (total black) and 255 is brightest (white), for each color channel (R,G,B or YCbCr). However, it should be noted that 10-bit and 12-bit quantization per color channel is rapidly entering mainstream video products, allowing extra precision that can be useful in reducing received image noise by minimizing roundoff error.

The advent of digital video provided an excellent opportunity to standardize, to a large degree, the interfaces...