As usual the article misrepresents video compression. Almost l useful coding tools are spatial and not frequency based; the only famous one (DCT) was replaced with a rough approximation in H.264 and it works just as well.
This is because lots of realistic images don't really have meaningful frequency-based content. (imagine sampling every 8 or 16 pixels - would their values be in any way related to each other?)
Next, each 8×8 block of each component (Y, Cb, Cr) is converted to a frequency-___domain representation, using a normalized, two-dimensional type-II discrete cosine transform (DCT).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG
This is because lots of realistic images don't really have meaningful frequency-based content. (imagine sampling every 8 or 16 pixels - would their values be in any way related to each other?)