AVC Video Format

What is AVC video format? AVC video format, short for Advanced Video Coding, is a digital video compression format. The intent of AVC video format was originally to be capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards, without increasing the complexity of design. An additional goal for AVC video file formats was to provide enough flexibility to allow AVC video format standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems.

The standardization of the first version of AVC video format was completed in May 2003. AVC video format is the latest block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and it was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT), which developed extensions to the original standard that are known as the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt). The design work on the Fidelity Range Extensions was completed in July 2004, and the drafting work on them was completed in September 2004. Scalable Video Coding as specified in Annex G of AVC video file formats allows the construction of bitstreams that contain sub-bitstreams that conform to AVC video format. The Scalable Video Coding extension was completed in November 2007.

The H.264 video codec has a very broad application range that covers all forms of digital compressed video from low bit-rate Internet streaming applications to HDTV broadcast and Digital Cinema applications with nearly lossless coding. In order to ensure compatibility of AVC video format, many standards bodies have amended or added to their video-related standards so that users of these standards can employ H.264/AVC. Both the Blu-ray Disc format and the now-discontinued HD DVD format include the H.264/AVC High Profile as one of 3 mandatory video compression codecs. Sony has also chosen AVC video format for their Memory Stick Video format.