An increasing number of applications today make use of digital video for various purposes including, for example, remote business meetings via video conferencing, high definition video entertainment, video advertisements, and sharing of user-generated videos. As technology is evolving, people have higher expectations for video quality and expect high resolution video even when transmitted over communications channels having limited bandwidth.
To permit higher quality transmission of video while limiting bandwidth consumption, a number of video compression schemes are noted including proprietary formats such as VPx (promulgated by On2 Technologies, Inc. of Clifton Park, N.Y.) and H.264, standard promulgated by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), including present and future versions thereof. H.264 is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG-4 AVC (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10).
These compression schemes may use prediction techniques to minimize the amount of data required to transmit video information. Prediction techniques can allow for multiple past transmitted frames and future frames to be transmitted out of order and used as a potential reference frame predictors for macroblocks in a frame. For example, video compression schemes, such as the MPEG or H.264 standard allow for transmission of frames out of order and use them to produce better predictors by use of forward or bidirectional prediction. Further, for example, the H.264 video compression standard allows for multiple past reference frames to be used as a predictor.