videbit

Videbit is a term that has appeared in discussions about coding, compression, and quality assessment of digital video. It is not an established unit in video engineering, and there is no formal standard defining it. The term generally denotes a proposed unit of information content within a video stream, intended to account for perceptual significance or frame-level information beyond a simple bit. In some speculative or theoretical works, a videbit may be defined as the amount of information needed to encode a pixel value in a representative frame, adjusted by a perceptual weight based on human visual sensitivity. In other proposals, a videbit is simply a relative unit used to compare encoding efficiency across different codecs or settings, without prescribing a fixed conversion to bits per second.

Because videbit lacks standardization and widespread adoption, it is not used in official codec specifications or streaming platforms. Industry practice typically relies on bitrate (bits per second), resolution, frame rate, and objective quality metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, or VMAF. Proponents argue videbits could improve modeling of perceptual video quality and adaptive streaming decisions; opponents note the risk of fragmentation and confusion with existing metrics.

History and usage: The term has appeared sporadically in academic debates and online discussions since the early 2000s, but it has never matured into a formal standard. Etymology: A portmanteau of video and bit, with no official coinage body.

See also: Bit, Byte, Bitrate, Video compression, Perceptual video quality metrics, PSNR, SSIM, VMAF.