Videos and images as well as audio and sound, are important components of Multimedia. By these elements the multimedia applications become more expressiv and more interesting, offline or by online presentations on the internet. As in Audio sector we have various formats and standards in video sector as well.

There are also several protocols and software interfaces for transfering video files through the Internet, such as RTP, RTSP and SMIL. However, one of the most common formats for transfering videos on the net is the streaming format.

Streaming is not about one specific method but it is a collective name for different techniques. Actually, streaming is a kind of almost realtime transfering of compressed video and audio files through the Internet.

Streaming media are used in different areas, from entertainment like broadcasting of live events ( such as concerts, shows or just music across the Internet-Radios, online advertisement, news and sports events) to Internet television ( IPTV ), video and web conferencing.

In general, there are two sorts of streaming, one is the on-demand streaming, where a file which is located on a streaming server can be played, and the second one is the live streaming which allows live recordings to be fed directly to the net. On the other hand, through the so called inteligent streaming technique, the data stream can be adjusted to the band width of the users access point.

However, all the data is not downloaded at the same time, but in stages by the so called store-and-forward process. Instead of downloading the file at once, first the data is temporary buffered and as a result, a little delay is caused at the begining of the broadcasting. Hereby, it is both possible, live broadcasting or downloading the files to other time.

The data quality and transfer rate depends on the provided band width and in order to garantie a continuous data transfer you should have an Internet connection of minimum 300 kbit/s.

There are various formats for audio and video streaming. The most famous formats are MP3, RealAudio, Quicktime WMA, MPEG and DivX. DivX is a video compression format developed by DivX Networks and is based on "MPEG-4 Part 2 Video Coding".

This patented compression format is very efficient and reduces video data to one tenth of its original size. However, DivX can only compress video data, the sound has to be compressed separately by a audio compression format such as MP3.

The digital recording technique is also affecting the film industry more and more. The DV format has been created by several companies and is known as DVCAM, DVC, DVCPro, MiniDV and Digital-8 (D8). Through another compressing process you can scale down the size of the file to one fifth of its original size and a data rate of 25 Mbit/s can be achieved here.

Moreover, there are a few other specific video formats which are used in studios. The majority of these formats have a resolution of 720 x 576 dpi, some of them comply with the CCIR - file format and the others are designed for HDTV with a resolution of 1.920 x 1.080 or 1.280 x 720 dpi. The known formats are MicroMV, DVC-AM and IMX by Sony, DVC Pro25, DVC Pro50 and DVC Pro100 by Panasonic, as well as High Definition Video (HDV) by Canon and Sharp.