Explore how computer systems store, manipulate, and convert various data types like text, images, and videos through integrated software and hardware. Gain insights into accessible data representation.

Computer systems do not understand human instructions, nor can they perceive real-life data in its raw form. Therefore, computer systems require a way to store and represent information in an accessible way. They use software and hardware components combined to help retrieve information, store it, manipulate it, and convert it back to a human-accessible format. If you want to learn how computer systems perform complex tasks such as storing and manipulating textual data, videos, music, images of your cat, and much more, this course is meant for you.

Information Representation in Computer Systems

Have you ever seen one of those things where a cartoonist draws pictures on successive pages in a notebook and then flips the pages quickly so it appears as if the picture is in motion? That’s the basis of videos: images displayed rapidly from one to the next. Each image is called a frame, and the rate at which we change the images is called the frame rate.

In simple words, a video is a succession of images. And images, as we already know, are three-dimensional arrays of coloured pixels. Therefore, a video is simply a succession of three-dimensional arrays of colored pixels like shown in Figure 1.

Each image in a video is called a frame. Each video can be described with three attributes:

* Duration (time in minutes or hours)

* Frame size (number of horizontal and vertical pixels)

* Frame rate (frames per second)

In this lesson, you will learn how videos are represented in a computer system.

Computer basics

Hardware and Software Components of a Computer

Data Representation in Python

Image, Audio, and Video Representation in Python

Data Compression

Video Representation

What is a video?