H.264

H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10, or MPEG-4 AVC, is a high compression digital video codec standard written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 standard are technically identical.

H.264 is a name related to the ITU-T line of H.26x video standards, while AVC relates to the ISO/IEC MPEG side of the partnership project that completed the work on the standard, after earlier development done in the ITU-T as a project called H.26L. It is usual to call the standard as H.264/AVC (or AVC/H.264 or H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or MPEG-4/H.264 AVC) to emphasize the common heritage.

The primary goal of this standardization effort has been to create a simple and straightforward video coding design that would be capable of providing good video quality with enhanced compression performance, and to do so without so much of an increase in complexity as to make the design impractical and expensive to implement.

H.264/AVC is quickly becoming (if not considered already) the standard for offering high-resolution video broadcast, mobile video streaming (Internet and broadcast), and professional applications such as cinema content storage and transmission.

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