1080i HDV format video is an industry ratified MPEG2 video encoding standard with an interlaced resolution of 1440 horizontal anamorphic pixels by 1080 vertical pixels and uses a color sampling rate of 4:2:0 with a 25mbps data rate. Audio is recorded at a bitrate of 384kb/s using MPEG-1 Layer 2 compression.

This data rate is the same as MiniDV so that the same tapes may be used for recording formats.