Many important developments in video compression technologies have occurred during the past two decades. The block-based discrete cosine transform with motion compensation hybrid coding scheme has been widely employed by most available video coding standards

notably the ITU-T H.26

x

and ISO/IEC MPEG-

x

families and video part of China audio video coding standard (AVS). The objective of this paper is to provide a review of the developments of the four basic building blocks of hybrid coding scheme

namely predictive coding

transform coding

quantization and entropy coding

and give theoretical analyses and summaries of the technological advancements. We further analyze the development trends and perspectives of video compression

highlighting problems and research directions.