Alliance Urges Royalty-Free H.264 Video Standard

A group of over 20 companies, including Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telekom, Polycom, Sun Microsystems and others, have formed an alliance to advocate the final approval of a royalty-free baseline profile for the upcoming H.264 Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC) standard.

The alliance, which is working in conjunction with the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC), said a royalty-free profile would enable industry to bring an open, internationally standardized video codec to market quickly, without time-consuming and fractious licensing negotiations, and avoids the market risks associated with proprietary codecs.

The H.264/AVC standard is approaching completion by the Joint Video Team (JVT), which consists of Video Coding Experts Group (ITU VCEG), and the International Organization for Standardization's Moving Pictures Experts Group (ISO MPEG). H.264 will be simultaneously known as H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC. The companies noted that H.264 could enable high-definition movies on DVD, two to three times more TV channels on cable and satellite, smooth video over mobile phones, and other promising applications.
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