What Is Group Of Pictures (GOP)?

It's not just your imagination—Group Of Pictures (GOP) is accurate, not just a group of pictures. The GOP is made up of one or more picture types. The first picture type is known as the keyframe. It contains all the information needed to decode the sequence, so it's critical to decipher the rest of the structures in a video file. You'll find one or more I-pictures (intra-coded pictures). These are encoded with their data and don't rely on data from other frames to be decoded; they can be solved independently from other structures in a video sequence. Next are P-pictures (predicted pictures), which require additional information from different frames to interpret correctly. It can happen by referencing pixels from another structure (forward prediction) or from its stand (backward prediction). Finally, both on and back projections encode B pictures (not pictured). They're like P-pictures but a little better because they can use more than one reference point when calculating their values! There are two main types of GOPs: intra and inter. Inter-GOP timing is the most common and is used when there is much movement between frames. Intra-GOP timing is useful for frame-by-frame situations with no significant motion between frames. Intra-GOP GOPs are more compressed than inter-GOP GOPs. It is because inter-GOP frames can reference previous frames for data. When watching a video, you can see the "GOP" numbers in the upper corner of the screen. These represent the number of frames in each group. GOPs, or groups of pictures, are the fundamental building blocks of streaming video. They contain a mix of different types of encoded frames, including intra-coded pictures (I-frames), predictive-coded pictures (P-frames), inter-predicted frames (B-frames) and directly coded frames (D-frames). GOPs are not limited to streaming video; they also have applications in digital television broadcasting, high-definition television and other areas.