What is H.264 . . . and Why Should You Care?
March 13th, 2010 | by admin |H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is an industry standard for video compression. The H.264 standard is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 and is a successor to earlier standards such as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. An ITU standard for compressing video based on MPEG-4 that is popular, especially for high-definition video. AVC stands for Advanced Video Coding. Actually its identical to H.264 so you can find it as H.264, H.264/AVC, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or MPEG-4 Part 10 (it can be twice as efficient as MPEG-4 Part 2).
Taking advantage of today’s high-speed chips, H.264 delivers MPEG-4 quality with a frame size up to four times greater. It can also provide MPEG-2 quality at a reduced data rate, requiring as little as one third the original bandwidths.
Retaining visual fidelity while avoiding excessive bandwidth use is an issue for all web video publishers. For that reason, professionals will often use a bitrate calculator to figure out the optimum bitrate for a given audience.