The video transmission using wireless technology is an important functionality in multimedia communication. Video coding/compression and real time transmission are the key indicators to select the appropriate techniques and needs very careful designing of the parameters. The extra efforts taken at the encoder side allows the decoding of the video on a less powerful hardware platform, where the issues like client buffer capacity and computational time are very critical. This article surveys and appraises available literature on various video encoding and wireless transmission techniques. It also discusses various parameters of wireless medium like reliability, QoS, transmission rate, transmission delay for video transmission as a key element of wireless multimedia communication. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.