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Satellite
& Cable
January
13 , 2003
ITU, JVT jointly develop H.264 standard
SWITZERLAND -- The ITU and the ISO/IEC Joint Video Team
(JVT), a pre-eminent group of experts from these three
international standards organisations, have agreed upon
the technical design of a new video compression standard
in Japan. The new standard, to be known as H.264 and
as the ISO/IEC 14496-10/MPEG-4 AVC, will likely be published
in Q2 2003.
The
standard promises dramatic improvements in video quality
and is likely to find use in a variety of applications
-- from mobile phones to HDTVs. It is destined to revolutionise
video picture quality over networks such as the Internet,
3G and PSTN. It follows in the footsteps of previous
video coding advances, such as H.261, H.262|MPEG2-video
and H.263, but surpasses earlier video standards in
terms of video quality, compression efficiency and resilience
to packet and data loss, the type of network impairments
found on the Internet. Potentially, it could halve the
bandwidth necessary for digital video services.
Besides
better image quality, improved data compression offers
advantages in terms of bandwidth usage (more channels
over existing systems) or greater media storage (more
video files onto media such as DVDs). It is likely to
benefit areas such as videoconferencing, video broadcasting,
streaming and video-on-mobile, tele-medicine and distance
learning. The JVT will spend the next three months on
the final preparation of the text for approval and publication
by the ISO/IEC and the ITU-T.
Gary
Sullivan, chairman of the JVT and the ITU-T Video Coding
Experts Group VCEG, said: "We have achieved a key
milestone in making this important new standard available
to the industry at large. It's a credit to the entire
team that the technical design was completed in record
time and it paves the way for the adoption of this exciting
technology in 2003." Leonardo Chiariglione, convenor
of the MPEG Committee, noted, "This result is testimony
to the dedication and spirit of cooperation achieved
between a group of the world's leading coding experts."
Contact:
ITU-T Study Group 16
Tel: + 41-22-730-6039
Fax: +41-22-730-6939
Email: pressinfo@itu.int
Web: www.itu.int
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