An overview of H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10

The video coding standards to date have not been able to address all the needs required by varying bit rates of different applications and the at the same time meeting the quality requirements. An emerging video coding standard named H.264 or MPEG-4 part 10 aims at coding video sequences at approximately half the bit rate compared to MPEG-2 at the same quality. It also aims at having significant improvements in coding efficiency, error robustness and network friendliness. It makes use of better prediction methods for Intra (I), Predictive (P) and Bi-predictive (B) frames. All these features along with others such as CABAC (Context Based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) have resulted in having a 2:1 coding gain over MPEG-2 at the cost of increased complexity.