HVideo compression design, analysis, consulting and research White Paper: An Overview of H.264 Advanced Video Coding Iain Richardson March 2007 Vcodex White Paper: An overview of H.264 www.vcodex.com 1 What is H.264 ? H.264 is an industry standard for video compression, the process of converting digital video into a format that takes up less capacity when it is stored or transmitted. Video compression (or video coding) is an essential technology for applications such as digital television, DVD-Video, mobile TV, videoconferencing and internet video streaming. Standardising video compression makes it possible for products from different manufacturers (e.g. encoders, decoders and storage media) to inter-operate. An encoder converts video into a compressed format and a decoder converts c……