WHEATBRIDGE ::H.264: An Excellent Choice

H.264 VIDEO: AN EXCELLENT CHOICE

H.264 video provides good quality at lower bit rates than previous standards: half the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2. The standard has been applied to a variety of applications, networks, and systems. The standard applies to DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, ITU-T multimedia telephony systems, broadcast, and low/high resolution video. Switching to H.264 is often only as complicated as an evolutionary transition to the new technology, as many video devices, such as Impath's, can be adapted to decode the streams. In other words, for economy's sake, it is no problem to phase in H.264 like any other replacement scheduling program.

The application range for H.264 is broad and covers all types of compressed digital video, including digital cinema apps, HDTV broadcasts, internet video streaming. The encoding is nearly lossless yet very high quality. For example, H.264 provides the same quality as current MPEG-2 applications for digital satellite TV yet it uses half the bitrate.

H.264 has enabled the video surveillance industry to stream high resolution at lower bit rates. Because of the individual frame capture quality, however, it is recommended that IP camera installations be used to enable capture of individual frames using different technologies.

Most H.264 encoders will encode several types of streams simultaneously, which can be decoded for differing purposes. Resulting video streams can be channeled across Intranets and local area networks through virtual LANS, which control where and who has access to the streams.

H.264 can be used directly within the HTML 5 internet standard. HTML 5 adds two new tags directly related to video: <video> and <audio>, which directly embed video and audio content. In Wikipedia, it is noted:

"HTML 5 is being developed by the HTML 5 working group as an open standard to be adopted by all web browser developers. In 2009, the HTML 5 working group was split between supporters of Ogg Theora, which is an open standard that is thought to be unencumbered by patents, and H.264 which contains patented technology. As late as July 2009, Google and Apple were said to be supporting H.264, while Mozilla and Opera were supporting Ogg Theora. However, in January of 2011, Google announced that they were pulling support for H.264 from their Chrome browser in favor of another open video compression format called WebM." The reason Google has given for this change is that WebM (which pairs VP8 video with Vorbis audio) and Theora are "open codecs" and H.264 is not. The benefits of H.264 from the developer's perspective remain. The only issue might be that when it comes time to serve the video to the public a second stream--webM--can be deployed for Chrome and Firefox, while Microsoft and Apple will continue to use H.264.

Nevertheless, implementation from a developer's point of view remains fairly straightforward.

Here is a link to a summary of H.264 technology.