Gratuitously Stolen from Wikipedia H.264/MPEG-4 AVC H.264,
MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC, for Advanced Video Coding, is a digital
video codec standard which is noted for achieving very high data
compression. It was written by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts
Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts
Group (MPEG) as the product of a collective partnership effort
known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard
and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10 standard (formally, ISO/IEC
14496-10) are technically identical. The final drafting work on
the first version of the standard was completed in May of 2003.
...The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard
that would be capable of providing good video quality at bit
rates that are substantially lower (e.g., half or less) than
what previous standards would need (e.g., relative to MPEG-2,
H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), and to do so without so much of an
increase in complexity as to make the design impractical
(excessively expensive) to impleme