The limits of the telecommunication infrastructures are being pushed by the web-based video traffic because of the continuous increase in consumption of products that heavily rely on videos, such as social media, streaming services, and video conferencing platforms. This growth tends to be even higher since the forecasts regarding the consumption of multimedia were done before the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased the use of video services for professional or entertainment purposes. Video encoding is essential and mandatory for applications that use digital videos, due to the large amount of data needed to represent them. Considering the growing need for video resolutions and frame rates, in recent years many encoders have been developed, some of them being: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), Google VP9, the AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), and Versatile Video Coding (VVC). HEVC is a video standard released in 2013 that has doubled compression rates while maintaining the same video quality when compared to its predecessor, H.264/AVC. VP9 is an encoder released by Google in 2013, focused on a solution designed to be royalty-free and also doubled the compression rate compared to the previous version, VP8. AV1 and VVC are the current state-of-the-art encoders, released in 2018 and 2020 respectively. The generic encoding process follows the block-based hybrid scheme composed of interframe and intraframe predictions, transforms, quantization, entropy encoding, inverse quantization, inverse transforms, and in-loop filters. Each type of encoder exploits common video characteristics using different tools, but each one has its own specificities which make them unique. In order to better understand this context, the main goal of this presentation is to show an overview of the basics of video coding, starting from the basic concepts to the discussion of the generic video encoder, introducing some applications and examples of the new codecs.