H.264 / MPEG 4

For some of us video 'experts', the issue of what video standard to use (or sell) has reared it's ugly head by now. MPEG-4 and the newer H.264 are the latest standards and some consider them branches of the same tree. They are both standards based on video compression or video coding technology from circa. 1995.



A encoder\decoder pair operates by the encoder converting video into a compressed format and the decoder converts the video back into an uncompressed format. This compression is neccessary to store or transmit video images. All of the standards do this, but the later, more efficient H.264 development does it much better. There is a lot of technical information on how this is done, ie: prediction, transform, quantization, enrtopy encoding. We won't go into this here.



What is important is the application and performance. Compared with MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, H.264 can deliver better image quality at the same compressed bitrate or lower the bitrate for the same image quality.

An example would be the DVD technology. A single layer DVD can store a 2 hr movie in MPEG-2 format. H.264 can double that to 4 hours of movie quality video in the same space.

H.264 Resolution is higher which serves the High Definition trends well. The images are amazing.

There is a cost for this increased performance, as you would imagine. The CPU needs greater computational capacity. In other words, more processing power. The secret for us will be finding the maufaturer that can do this cost effectifvely. Each manufacturer has developed their own method of developing and delivering the science.

H.264 is still an exciting development. This type of technological advancement is why I love working in this field. We ge to play with the new toys first.