For this reason, though H.264 is technically capable of HDR support and is included in one Dolby Vision bitstream profile, the vast majority of Dolby Vision and other HDR streams are encoded with HEVC. H.265 quality, you can see why H.264 is a poor choice for 4K video, since the ~35% bandwidth savings delivered by H.265 is significant and can make or break delivery to some homes. On the other hand, if you compare H.264 vs. Understandably, H.264 has received the lion’s share of attention in low-latency applications, whether HTTP-based or WebRTC. H.264 excels in live origination and transcode because of encoding speed all other codecs need hardware support for both functions. We see in table 3 that codecs also vary in suitability for different functions. Still, most companies (excluding the top tier of streaming broadcasters) tend to adopt new codecs only when they enable entry into new markets, not as a cost-saving measure. Of course, better encoding quality offered by VP9, HEVC, and AV1 decreases bandwidth costs for delivery to compatible players, which can in turn offset the additional encoding and storage costs. So, streams encoded with VP9 and HEVC at 65% the data rate of a stream encoded with H.264 should have about the same quality. Encoding quality describes the bitrate reduction the codec can achieve while delivering the same quality as H.264. So, for VP9, encoding should take between 2–15 times longer than H.264. To explain table 2, encoding complexity is the encoding time as compared to H.264. Since no codec can completely replace H.264 at this point, these encoding or transcoding costs are additive to existing H.264 encoding-related costs. This translates to higher encoding and transcoding costs. That is, the better the encoding quality, the longer it takes to encode. With most codecs, there’s an inverse relationship between the two. When gauging codec performance, you consider two aspects: (1) encoding complexity or speed, and (2) encoding quality. That said, there are several submarkets where other codecs are making serious inroads. Simply stated, the primary reason that H.264 continues to dominate the worldwide streaming markets is because it plays everywhere. As a broadcast standard, H.264 was supported by many television sets and/or set-top boxes long before the video was delivered via IP.
ADVANCED VIDEO CODEC PLAYER ANDROID
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.
ADVANCED VIDEO CODEC PLAYER SOFTWARE
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. 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.
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