Common Intermediate Format

The Common Intermediate Format (CIF ) was developed by the International Telecommunication Union ( ITU) introduced in video conferencing standard H.261 because the two video standards NTSC and PAL have different resolutions and refresh rates. This resulted in compatibility problems when a video conference should be built from an NTSC - based screen and camera to a PAL - based screen and camera.

This is an intermediate format in which both NTSC and PAL so to speak, meet halfway, because the greater spatial resolution of PAL and the greater temporal resolution of NTSC is used. All lengths and widths are even multiples of 16 pixels. The CIF pixels are not square, thus may not be directly compared with computer pixels.

QCIF stands for Quarter CIF. This is in addition to CIF the most common format in the video coding. " Quarter " means here that the image surface quartered, so the height and width are halved.

The table to the right shows the most common formats for video resolutions with name and number of pixels.

  • Data format
  • Television Technology
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