The Android platform added H.264 support with version 3, which shipped in 2011, wrapping up the two dominant mobile players. Today, the website Can I Use reports that H.264 playback is available on over 98.23% of global browsers.Īpple started supporting H.264 with the first iPod touch device and all subsequent iPod touch models, iPhones, and iPads. Once Adobe added H.264 support to Flash, the computer browser market shifted almost immediately to H.264. The streaming market was much simpler when H.264 first launched, with computers comprising the dominating platform for streaming video and one plug-in, Adobe Flash, the dominant video player for most websites. Because H.264 is a standard, all video encoded by any H.264 codec should play on any H.264 decoder or player, whether in a browser, smartphone, or Smart TV. Intel and NVIDIA both offer hardware-accelerated H.264 codecs that can be accessed from the Wowza Streaming Engine. H.264 first launched in May 2003 as the successor to MPEG-2, primarily for use in broadcast applications as the internet was nascent.Īs a video standard, there are multiple implementations of the H.264 codec, including the x264 codec in FFmpeg, and the Beamr codec used in the Wowza Streaming Engine. Technically, AVC is defined in Part 10 of the MPEG-4 standard, and is different from the MPEG-4 codec, which was defined in Part 2 and never really got traction in the marketplace. H.264 and AVC refer to the same technology and are used interchangeably. It was created by two standards bodies, the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group, which called the standard H.264, and the ISO/IEC JTC1 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which called the standard Advanced Video Coding (AVC). H.264 is a video coding standard or codec. We’ll conclude with a section on what you need to know to effectively deploy the H.264 codec, particularly within the Wowza Streaming Engine software and the Wowza Streaming Cloud service. Streaming lossless media isn’t feasible for most Internet connections, which is why lossy codecs like H.264 and H.265 prevail online.This article provides a quick overview of the H.264 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It’s a trade-off between quality and playback experience, with lossy codecs offering much smoother playback that might include interpolation and other compression artifacts. During playback, lossless codecs completely reconstruct the compressed data while lossy codecs serve up only an approximation. But out of all of them, H.264 and H.265 get the most attention by far.Ĭodecs come in two classes: lossless and lossy. MPEG-2, JPEG2000, and VP9 are just a few you might hear about. There are lots of different video codecs out there. The codec comes into play at the start, determining how the raw footage and sound are compressed within the container, and decodes the file for playback as needed. The difference is this: A container holds the compressed video and audio and any other components of the file, such as any metadata or subtitles. For video files, that means formats like AVI, MOV, or MP4. The term itself is a combination of the words “coding” and “decoding.”Ĭodecs are often confused with containers. There are also audio codecs that do the same for audio. But what even is a “codec”?Ī video codec is a process for compressing and decompressing video data. It’s a term you’ll hear often in the streaming world and probably use a fair bit yourself. H.265: Average bandwidth required per resolution But the shift from macroblocks to CTUs is the most significant contributor to H.265’s greater efficiency. There are other technological enhancements at work, such as superior motion compensation and spatial prediction. H.265 uses a newer block structure called coding tree units (CTUs), which can process sizes of up to 64×64 pixels. H.264 uses what are called macroblocks, processing units that span 4×4 to 16×16 pixels. What accounts for this difference is how each video compression standard processes frames. This is a big advantage especially when it comes to storing and streaming 4K video and other high-resolution video content. The benefits of this are twofold: H.265 video files don’t take up as much storage space, and they require less bandwidth to stream. The H.265 codec compresses information more efficiently than H.264, resulting in files of comparable video quality that are about half the size.
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