Word.ws English Dictionary

bitstarve

bitstarve verb: to cause something to have compression artifacts (esp. blocking) by using too small a bitrate.

Verb

bitstarve (third-person singular simple present bitstarves, present participle bitstarving, simple past and past participle bitstarved)

  1. (transitive) To cause something to have compression artifacts (esp. blocking) by using too small a bitrate.
    • This is why bit-starved transmission streams yield a very blocky appearance. They reveal the blocky structure because the fine detail is lost and that prevents the edges of the macroblocks from merging into one another perfectly.2005, Cliff Wootton, A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression: From Sprockets and Rasters to Macroblocks, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 206
    • I had Dish for years, ditched them when they couldn't get me HD equipment in
      a timely manner and insisted on charging me $3 if I didn't hook my equipment
      to a phone line. WTF! Went to Comcast, gave me a great deal. But, they got
      bought by TW, and I am not impressed so far, so when my smokin deal...2006 November 24, Venger, “NFL turns back on 52 million cable viewers”, in alt.sports.football.pro.dallas-cowboys (Usenet)

Forms of bitstarve

third-person singular presentbitstarves
present participlebitstarving
past participlebitstarved
pastbitstarved
alternative formbit-starve

Origin of bitstarve

bit + starve

Questions about bitstarve

What does bitstarve mean?
Bitstarve means to cause something to have compression artifacts (esp. blocking) by using too small a bitrate.
What part of speech is bitstarve?
Bitstarve is a verb.
What is the past tense of bitstarve?
The past tense of bitstarve is bitstarved.

Words near bitstarve in the dictionary

  1. bitsier
  2. bitsiest
  3. bitslice
  4. bitslices
  5. bitsquatting
  6. bitstarve
  7. bitstarved
  8. bitstarves
  9. bitstarving
  10. bitstate
  11. bitstates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bitstarve (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-bitstarve.wav.

Cite this entry: “bitstarve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bitstarve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.