Is H.264 all it’s cracked up to be?

Saturday 30 May 2009

Is H.264 all it’s cracked up to be?

Walking around IFSEC this year, one couldn’t help notice the number of CCTV manufacturers who had H.264 stamped on their kit. However, we bumped into a few people at the show – who might be described as old curmudgeons – who weren’t enamoured with it at all.

So what is it and what’s all the controversy about?
H.264 is the latest motion-compensation-based codec developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) in a partnership known as the Joint Video Team (JVT).

H.264 is also known as MPEG-4 part 10 (not to be confused with MPEG-4 Part 2) and MPEG-4 AVC (advance video coding).

Designed as an all-purpose video standard to be used across a range of applications - including low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, IP packet networks and multimedia telephone systems - H.264 is a motion-compensation-based codec which means, in short, that it performs some clever tricks to predict where moving objects in a scene will travel, thus reducing the amount of video data that has to be retransmitted with every frame of video.

It has a menu of tools which can be implemented or not, depending on the application. Each tool brings with it a set of benefits and costs so each implementation of H.264 can achieve different results. Implement more of the H.264 “toolbox” and you get smaller bitstreams (lower bandwidth required) but at the cost of more processing power or increased latency as the bitstream undergoes more intensive processing by higher power algorithms.

Proponents of H.264 claim it delivers :
- Improvements in video quality and compression over MPEG-4 and MPEG-2.
- Low latency times
- Up to 300:1 video compression
Detractors variously claim it is:
- Too complex for the task, requiring too much computational power
- Too slow, leading to higher latency times, especially at the higher compression levels
- Not much of an advance on MPEG-4 (part 2)
- Expensive to implement
- A bunch of hype as manufacturers implement the very simplest profiles of H.264 and fail to realise the true value of this wonderful new compression standard.
Have you bought or specified H.264 products? Does your company manufacture H.264 compliant products? Do you think it represents a significant step forward from MPEG-4 part 2?

Or is H.264 just the latest “must-have” badge on manufacturer’s products? Is it too costly for the benefits it delivers?

Write to us, call us, let us know what you think about this hot topic.

Contact me at: editor@cctvimage.com or Tel. 020-8255 5007
We’ll publish a selection of responses in CCTV Image magazine and online.
Best regards,
Tom Reeve
Editorial Director
CCTV Media
www.cctvmedia.co.uk

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Saturday 30 May 2009