"A cell encoder breaks the video into cells. A cell is 16 pixels, arranged in a 4x4 group (Figure B-1). Cells are encoded into the bytestream in scanline order, from left to right and from top to bottom.
The basic encoding scheme used in both versions of Cell is based on an image coding method called Block Truncation Coding (BTC). The 16 pixels in a cell are represented by a 16-bit mask and two intensities or colors. These values specify which intensity to place at each of the pixel positions. The mask and intensities can be chosen to maintain certain statistics of the cell, or they can be chosen to reduce contouring in a manner similar to ordered dither.
The primary advantage of BTC is that its decoding process is similar to the operation of character fonting in a color framebuffer. The character display process for a framebuffer takes as input a foreground color, a background color, and a mask that specifies whether to use the foreground or background color at each pixel. Because this function is so important to the window system, it is often implemented as a display primitive in graphics accelerators. The Cell compression technique leverages these existing primitives to provide full-motion video decoding without special hardware or modifications to the window system."
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/802-1318-10/ug11cell.htm...
"A cell encoder breaks the video into cells. A cell is 16 pixels, arranged in a 4x4 group (Figure B-1). Cells are encoded into the bytestream in scanline order, from left to right and from top to bottom.
The basic encoding scheme used in both versions of Cell is based on an image coding method called Block Truncation Coding (BTC). The 16 pixels in a cell are represented by a 16-bit mask and two intensities or colors. These values specify which intensity to place at each of the pixel positions. The mask and intensities can be chosen to maintain certain statistics of the cell, or they can be chosen to reduce contouring in a manner similar to ordered dither.
The primary advantage of BTC is that its decoding process is similar to the operation of character fonting in a color framebuffer. The character display process for a framebuffer takes as input a foreground color, a background color, and a mask that specifies whether to use the foreground or background color at each pixel. Because this function is so important to the window system, it is often implemented as a display primitive in graphics accelerators. The Cell compression technique leverages these existing primitives to provide full-motion video decoding without special hardware or modifications to the window system."