Data are usually read from videocamera or videocard as YCbCr data format (often wrongwrongly marked as YUV, thatwhich should be used for analog data only). The coding process varies greatly depending on which encoder is used (e.g.: [[JPEG|JPEG]], [[H.264/MPEG-4 AVC|H.264]]), but the most common steps usually include: partitioning into [[Macroblock|macroblocks]], transform (e.g.: [[Discrete cosine transform|DCT]], or [[Discrete wavelet transform|wavelet]]), [[Quantization_(image_processing)|quantization]] and [[Entropy encoding|entropy encoding]].
Intra-frame coding is applied to the partitioning into macroblocks step.