Apple Computer's H.264 AVC will be incorporated in its QuickTime software in an upcoming release next year.
The video technology has been ratified by the DVD Forum for use in the HD DVD format; it was jointly developed by the Motion Picture Expert’s Group (MPEG) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and has been ratified into the MPEG-4 specification.
At NAB2004, Apple demonstrated H.264, a codec that can scale audio and video to everything from 3G smartphones to HDTV and video. The company showed H.264 video playing on Power Mac G5 systems in full HD resolution (1920x1080 24p) at between 6.8- and 8Mb/s — about half the data rate of MPEG-2, the video compression standard used in DVD encoding.