The default mental image of video compression involves unwanted video artifacts, like pixelation and blockiness in the image. This sells short, though, the complexity that actually goes into compressing video content. In particular, it overlooks a fascinating process called interframe, which involves keyframes and delta frames to intelligently compress content in a manner that is intended to go unnoticed.

This article describes this process in detail, while also giving best practices and ideal encoder settings that you can apply to your live streaming at IBM Cloud Video. Much of this specific advice relates to streaming due to adaptive bitrates.