The H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard and its deployment status

The new video coding standard known as H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), now in its fourth version, has demonstrated significant achievements in terms of coding efficiency, robustness to a variety of network channels and conditions, and breadth of application. The recent fidelity range extensions have further improved compression quality and further broadened the range of applications, and the recent corrigenda have excised the inevitable errata of the initially-approved versions of the specification. Patent licensing programs have begun, the standard has been adopted into a variety of application specifications, and products suitable for widespread deployment have begun to appear. New work toward the near-term development of scalable video coding (SVC) extensions is also under way. This paper does not attempt to review the details of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC technical design, as that subject has been covered already in a number of publications. Instead, it covers only the high-level design characteristics and focuses more on the recent developments in the standardization community and the deployment status of the specification.