Book excerpt: Professionals in the video and multimedia industries need a book that explains industry standards for video coding and how to convert the compressed information between standards. Digital Video Transcoding for Transmission and Storage answers this demand while also supplying the theories and principles of video compression and transcoding technologies. Emphasizing digital video transcoding techniques, this book summarizes its content via examples of practical methods for transcoder implementation. It relates almost all of its featured transcoding technologies to practical applications. This volume takes a structured approach, starting with basic video transcoding concepts and progressing toward the most sophisticated systems. It summarizes material from research papers, lectures, and presentations. Organized into four parts, the text first provides the background of video coding theory, principles of video transmission, and video coding standards. The second part includes three chapters that explain the theory of video transcoding and practical problems. The third part explores buffer management, packet scheduling, and encryption in the transcoding. The book concludes by describing the application of transcoding, universal multimedia access with the emerging MPEG-21 standard, and the end-to-end test bed.