The H . 264 / AVC Video Coding Standard

T he H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding standard (H.264/AVC) is the newest video coding standard jointly developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). H.264/AVC has achieved a significant improvement in compression performance compared to prior standards, and it provides a network-friendly representation of the video that addresses both conversational (video telephony) and nonconversational (storage, broadcast, or streaming) applications. This article provides a description of the structure, technology, performance, and resources of H.264/AVC, which is referred to formally as ITU-T Recommendation H.264 and ISO/IEC 14496-10 (MPEG-4 Part 10).