Motion-Jpeg compression

Motion-Jpeg (MJPEG) is the video compression format that the DraCo uses when capturing and editing footage.

It basically works by compressing each video frame as a jpeg image (a second of video has between 24 to 30 frames per second depending on the video norm used). Its major advantage was that it did not require a lot of processing power from the host device to capture and manipulate this format. Its biggest flaw is that it uses lossy compression, so depending on the compression ratio used, some blockiness may be visible.

A big advantage of this format is that it is still being used a lot in networked enviroments and security facilities due to its tolerance on degraded streams and faulty conections. A packet lost of MJPEG still permits any suitable player to continue playing the original video feed without further fuss, unlike some modern compression codecs that rely on previous images to continue reproducing video.

Other advantages are the openess and simple nature of their encoders and decoders, unlike for example, H.264, VTASC, etc.

On the downside, there is lot of room for improvement in the compression concept of this codec, for both being lossy, which results in its reduced video quality, and for not achieving the immensely high compression rates we witness nowadays.

Every video codec we have nowadays, is only good certain tasks. There is no ideal one. They all have their strengths and weaknesses.As they say, in the end, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.