H.264 video can help reduce costs in terms of network equipment, bandwidth and storage
(15/06/2009)

As consumers increasingly demand better quality video for everything from HDTV to YouTube to mobile television on cell phones, video technologies have improved to produce extremely vivid motion pictures, multi-channel audio and higher frame rates, resulting in a more realistic viewing experience. But with the increase in clarity and realism naturally comes larger file sizes. The length of an average movie or TV program may not have changed much over the years, but the amount of data required to store and deliver the same content at higher quality has increased dramatically.

The challenge of improving video quality

The problem then, is how to store and deliver increasingly detailed digital media without causing bottlenecks in network traffic. The solution immediately presents itself: develop more efficient compression and decompression technologies.

Digital video compression and decompression technologies have come a long way. If you compare the video quality of an old VCD from the early ‘90s to today’s high-definition TV or Blu-Ray disks, chances are you won’t be overly impressed with the VCD version. As people grow more accustomed to higher quality video, their tolerance for blocky, pixilated video is reduced.

The early MPEG-1 compression used in VCDs was made obsolete with the introduction of MPEG-2, the standard format used in DVDs. Later, the MPEG-4 standard began replacing MPEG-2, although the early iterations of the MPEG-4 standard were not as successful as the more recent version, called MPEG-4 Part 10.

What is H.264?

MPEG-4 Part 10 (also known as H.264, and MPEG-4 AVC) technology uses the latest innovations in video encoding to provide incredible video quality from the smallest amount of video data. H.264 provides a far more efficient algorithm for compressing video than any other compression method available. This results in crisp, clear video in much smaller files, saving bandwidth and storage costs over previous generations of video codecs. H.264 also delivers excellent video quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum – from 40 Kbps (for 3G mobile phones) to upwards of 10 Mbps (for high-definition television), and everything in between.

H.264 delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at a third to half the data rate and up to four times the resolution of MPEG-4 Part 2 at the same data rate. Video files compressed with H.264 codecs are about one-ninth the file size of Motion JPEG, and about one-third the size of the MPEG-2 format used in DVDs. For high definition video, H.264 is 30-50% more efficient than MPEG-2. This frees up bandwidth so that content delivery networks can offer more programming, or more interactive programming such as on-demand video.

Its high compression efficiency and superior video quality have led to a growing agreement on the H.264 standard as the preferred standard for digital video for a wide variety of applications. Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD video disk formats incorporate H.264 standard codecs for home video.

A growing range of video applications

As the world increasingly embraces H.264, there will be growing demand for network video across any number of industries, including surveillance, transportation, health care, shipping and industrial automation. There will also be more and more integration of video and IP technologies to take advantage of the Internet as the world’s most ubiquitous transport medium, as well as existing 3G, 3.5G and future 4G mobile phone networks. In the transportation industry, intelligent transportation systems are being developed that integrate video with other mobile computing technologies for fleet control, location monitoring and traffic management.

Network video and bandwidth considerations

From this it is easy to see how H.264 video can help reduce costs in terms of network equipment, bandwidth and storage. However, the trade-off for the high compression rate is the huge computing requirement for H.264 encoding. H.264 compression requires about ten times more computing resources than MPEG-2. While single stream decoding can be accomplished with an average desktop PC and the right software, the task of simultaneously encoding and decoding multiple audio and video streams at once requires advanced, dedicated hardware. Developing and producing this hardware provides opportunities for suppliers that can quickly adapt and incorporate H.264 into their product offerings.

The combination of advanced compression technologies like H.264 with expanding network bandwidth from multi-gigabit Ethernet and broadband allow transmission of much higher resolution video streams without impacting network performance.