MPEG-4 Advanced Video Compression (MPEG-4 AVC)/H.264

Abstract

DefinitionMPEG-4 AVC or H.264 video compression standard was developed to enhance compression performance over current de facto standard MPEG-2 that was developed about 10 years ago primarily for digital TV systems with interlaced video coding.H.264 is known to achieve a significant improvement in rate-distortion efficiency compared with existing standards, and is designed for broadcast TV over cable/DSL/satellite, IP set-tops and high-definition DVD recorders.Network Adaptation Layer (NAL) and Video Coding Layer (VCL)VCL is designed to efficiently represent the video content, while NAL encapsulates the VCL representation of video with header information in such a way that a variety of transport layers and storage media can easily adopt compressed contents. To this end, a NAL unit specifies both byte-stream and packet-based formats. NAL units are classified into VCL and non-VCL NAL units. The VCL NAL units contain the ...