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FM JWBK457-Richardson March 24, 2010 11:24 Printer Name: Yet to Come
Preface
The last decade has seen a quiet revolution in digital video technology. Digital video is
everywhere: on our televisions, our DVD and Blu-Ray players, our computers, our music
players and our mobile handsets. Only recently, a video image in a web page was an unusual
sight. Nowadays, many of us are just as likely to catch the latest news on the web as on the
TV. With the explosion of digital video applications, a billion-dollar industry has developed
and expanded, with new companies and niche markets emerging, thriving and disappearing
faster than anyone can easily track. Video compression is essential to all of these applications
and markets, and the H.264 format is considered by many to be the state of the art in video
compression.
When I wrote the first edition of this book in 2003, H.264 Advanced Video Compression
had just been published as an International Standard and it was hard to predict its impact on
industry. Its predecessor, MPEG-4 Visual, had arguably failed to live up to its promise, with
only limited adoption in the market. Since 2003, the significant performance improvements
that are built into H.264 have made it the clear successor to the older MPEG video standards in
many applications, from mobile video to High Definition broadcasting. At the time of writing,
the MPEG and VCEG standards committees are debating the possible successor to H.264. It is
likely to be several years before a new standard is released, and several years after that before
H.264 begins to become obsolete.
This book is intended to be a practical, accessible and unbiased guide to the H.264 video
compression standard. As always, I have chosen to explain the details of H.264 in my own
way, concentrating on what I feel is important to the engineer, researcher or student who needs
a ‘way in’ to this complex yet important technical subject. This book is not the final word on
H.264. By definition, that final word is provided by the standard itself and I advise any serious
developer or implementer of H.264 to get hold of a copy of the standard. There is a need for
a guidebook to the standard that explains the concepts, tools, benefits and disadvantages of
the format, just as a good guidebook helps the tourist to get to know a foreign country and to
become more at home there. Some visitors may be disappointed that their favourite subject
is not covered in as much depth as they would like. I have made a deliberate choice to cover
certain topics such as Scalable and Multiview Video Coding only briefly as they are still, in
my view, in the early stages of practical implementation.
My sincere thanks to the many people who have helped to shape this book, including the
readers of my earlier books who told me what they liked and what they wanted; the many
companies and individuals who have asked me to solve their video compression problems;
Kourosh Soroushian for discussions on Hypothetical Reference Decoders; Abharana Bhat,
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