This book is a post-conference publication and contains a selection of papers presented at the VLBV workshop in 2005, which was held in Sardinia, Italy, on September 15-16. VLBV 2005 attracted very high interest among the scientific community, and the workshop received 85 submissions. Fifty-?ve papers were accepted and presented in three poster sessions focusing on “New Perspectives in Handling Multimedia Data”, “Wavelet Based Compression: Advances and Perspectives”, and “Applications of Distributed Video Coding”. Beyondprovidingaforumforthepresentationofhigh-qualityresearchpapers in various complementary aspects of visual content processing and distribution, the workshop gave the opportunity of exchanging ideas and opinions on hot topics in the fields by means of three open panels. The first was devoted to the role of standards, with the attempt of both panelists and audience to provide answers to challenging questions on the success of standards, their industrial spinoff, and the involvement of academic people in standardization activities. The second panel aimed to discuss the advances and the perspectives of wavelet based compression. The third one focused on the applications of distributed video coding; the discussion mainly regarded the real performance of such an approach in video coding when compared with traditional approaches. In addition to these components, the program was enriched by two sti- lating invited talks given by world-renowned researchers in the field: “Digital Cinema”, by Michael W. Marcellin and “Distributed Video Coding”, by Bernd Girod.