New features and applications of the H.264 video coding standard

This paper provides a brief overview of the H.264 video coding standard, focusing on its new features and applications. Outperforming all the previous standards over a wide range of bit-rates, H.264 is expected to flood the market in a large number of applications ranging from the real-time conversational services, to TV broadcasting or Internet streaming. At the basis of its high performance there is: a layered structure, improving the network friendliness; the adoption of clean and simple solutions enabling efficient implementations; the capability of allowing flexible delays for a variety of services; in addition to a powerful set of tools maximizing the coding efficiency.