ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a developed video coding standard, H.264 or Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)-4 Part 10 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) [h264], which has been developed and standardized collaboratively by the Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T Video Coding Expert Group. The H.264/AVC mainly targets for high coding efficiency. Based on the conventional block-based motion-compensated hybrid video coding concepts H.264/AVC provides approximately a 50% bitrate savings from equivalent perceptual quality relative to the performance of prior standards. To address the variety of applications and networks, the H.264/AVC codec design consists of two layers: video coding layer (VCL) and network abstraction layer (NAL). The function of the VCL is to efficiently compress the video content. The NAL is a new concept, which is designed for efficient transmission of the compressed bitstream in different network or storage environments.
