H.264 was joint development of MPEG and VCEG which aimed at better compression than H.263 and MPEG-4 Part 2. H.264 is also known as ‘Advanced Video Coding (AVC)', ‘MPEG-4 Part 10' and ‘ITU-T Recommendation H.264'. H.264 provides approximately 50-70% more compression than earlier standards.

H.264 introduced following new techniques for better compression.

• Reference pictures can be used in Inter prediction.
• Prediction is formed from a macro block or 4x4 luma blocks.
• Integer IDCT
• Quarter pixel motion compensation
• CAVLC, CABAC
• Bi directional Prediction
• Field Coding
• Weighted Prediction
• Deblocking filter

• Portable Players
• DVB-H Terminals
• Mobile TV
• Video Terminals
• Display Screens

• Gstreamer for Linux and Android
• Windows Mobile 6.x

• ARM9e, ARM11, Cortex-A5(NEON SIMD), Cortex-A7, Cortex-A8, Cortex-A9, Armada-168

• The decoder works for all video resolution settings, limited only by available memory
• Simple and easy to use API, which allows easy integration
• Limited usage of slower external memory, which ensures high performance on platforms using external memories
• Easily extendible to other platforms

Following Bit stream profiles are supported:

• H.264 Baseline Profile