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Common Intermediate Format
Last modified: Friday, April 02, 2004
(n.) A video format used in videoconferencing systems that easily supports both NTSC and PAL signals. CIF is part of the ITU H.261 videoconferencing standard. It specifies a data rate of 30 frames per second (fps), with each frame containing 288 lines and 352 pixels per line.
A related standard, QCIF (Quarter CIF), transfers one fourth the amount of data and is suitable for videoconferencing systems that use telephone lines.
CIF is sometimes called Full CIF (FCIF) to distinguish it from QCIF.
