One major requirement for multimedia systems is the efficient transmission of multimedia information over a communication or computer network. Several commercial products have been developed to apply compression techniques to images and videos in order to reduce their transmission time. Sufficient available time and bandwidth lead to satisfactory results, but image/video loss occurs if these resources are insufficient. Using imprecise computation theory, we can achieve a good tradeoff between the quality of the transmitted image/video and the available resources such as time for transmission. However, for a compressed image file, this very flexible technique cannot be easily applied since a compressed file cannot be uncompressed if it is not transmitted completely. This paper proposes an imprecise compressed image/video transmission technique which combines the advantages of both compression and imprecise computation for the first time. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better results compared to simply using compression or imprecise transmission techniques, and has a good potential for commercial use. *This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Award No. CCR-9111563, and IRI-9526004, by the Texas Advanced Research Program under Grant No. 3652270, and the University of Houston Institute of Space Systems Operations.