Digital video is the future of law enforcement; the next 5 years should witness an explosion of change and innovation in digital video technology. Understanding how digital video works is crucial to understanding its limitations, advantages, and how it can be used in court. The differences between analog and digital technologies are explained before the author introduces the concept of compression. Digital video contains a lot of information and is generally too large for modern day electronics to understand. As such, almost all digital video images must be compressed using either lossless or lossy compression techniques. While lossless compression retains all the video information, it usually does not sufficiently compress the video. Lossy compression is used in most cases and results in the loss of some of the detail in the video. Challenges to the use of digital video obtained with lossy compression in court are discussed as is the future of digital video technology, which holds many promises as law enforcement personnel and technology developers learn how to enhance the clarity and amount of information available through digital video technology.