The Winner of the War of Video Encoder: H.264

According to the report from MeFeedia, over 80% videos are using H.264 as their encoder. If the video is using HTML 5 video tag, it can be played on iPad directly without any help. Of course, this is not mean that you must do that or do that at present. This only means that if you do hope using the same version of video for iPad and other ways, you do not need to re-encode you video with other encoder, you just need to use HTML 5 instead of Flash. This report also points that H.264 is now used widely and really popular. A research on Jan. 2010, at that time, only 10% video was using H.264. And the number rises to 80% after only two years.

Thanks to the iPad and other device's popular, H.264 now dominates the world of video encoder. Most of the devices such as iPad, iPhone, etc support the H.264 hardware acceleration. At May, 2010, the report from MeFeeia showed that only 26% video use H.264 as video encoder.

It's clear that the file which supports HTML 5 is now influce the Giant more and more in video market. Such as Adobe announced that they will no longer provide Flash Player for mobile device's web browser, all kinds of operation system and other devices. Although WebM from Google has been become open source, it develops really slow. A report from MeFeedia, only 2% video use Google's VP8 as their video encoder. That means that the Google's purchase of On2 Technologies benefits Google nothing at all.

With more and more devices support H.264, the share of it will be higher in the future. Only in case that there is a competitor with enough competitiveness and widely used in the devices which support hardware acceleration, H.264 will be the winner in the war of video encoder.

What is H.264?

H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003.

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 – MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.

H.264 is perhaps best known as being one of the codec standards for Blu-ray Discs; all Blu-ray Disc players must be able to decode H.264. It is also widely used by streaming internet sources, such as videos from Vimeo, YouTube, and the iTunes Store, web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, broadcast services for DVB and SBTVD, direct-broadcast satellite television services, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing.