A Guideline to Video Codecs Delay

Due to the explosive growth of the internet and increasing demand for multimedia information on the web, streaming video over the Internet has received tremendous attention from academia and industry. Continuous media has a lot of issues and challenges. The most important among of them are delay. Delay is an expression of how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one point to another. Some of delay source are fixed while the other is not. This paper describes the delay sources and magnitude of the most common video codecs and thus provides a guideline for the choice of the most suitable codec for a given application. Keywords: Continuous media, Processing delay, Encoder, Decode