H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

H.264 is an industry standard for video compression, the state-of-the-art digital encoding format for high definition video. H.264 provides powerful compression technology that provides a superior video experience at a lower bit rate, without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement.

How does H.264 works?

An H.264 video encoder carries out prediction, transform and encoding processes to produce a compressed H.264 bitstream. An H.264 video decoder carries out the complementary processes of decoding, inverse transform and reconstruction to produce a decoded video sequence.

H.264 compression economize on space. Whether its on media or Bandwidth, or a codec(compression and decompression). By improving the compression standards upon which the codec is based, we can transmit higher quality video using the same bandwidth as before.

The H.264 standard offers substantial performance improvements over its predecessors. For example: A standard DVD can hold one two-hour movie compressed using the MPEG-2 (the popular standard for DVD movies) codec and four hours of movies using an H.264 codec.

References

1. http://www.divx.com/en/technologies/h264

2. http://www.vcodex.com/h264overview.html

3. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html