MJPEG

Motion JPEG (MJPEG) is a video codec where each frame is separately compressed into a JPEG image. The resulting stream's quality is independent from the motion in the image – which differs from MPEG video, where quality often decreases when small images move rapidly.

The bitrate is between so-called uncompressed formats, like RGB (compression 1:1) and YUV (compression 1:1.5 to 1:2.5), and MPEG, which uses similarities between images. For typical data rates (29Mb/s) quality is very high, but files are very large.

Besides YUV, it is mainly used by high-end frame grabber PC boards, like the AV Master. It is also used by digital video cameras (DVCs).