Apple announced that the H.264/Advanced Video Codec will be incorporated into Apple"s QuickTime software. This video technology was ratified by the DVD Forum for use in the HD DVD format. Despite some rumors Microsoft has no plans to incorporating this technology into its popular Media Player.
Apple on Wednesday announced that the H.264/Advanced Video Codec (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 High Definition (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 as well.
Apple has already demonstrated H.264 in action at April"s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2004 show in Las Vegas, Nev. The video codec can scale to everything from 3G smartphones to high definition television and video. At NAB, Apple showed H.264 video playing on Power Mac G5 systems in full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 24p) at between 6.8 and 8MBps -- about half the data rate of MPEG-2, the video compression standard used in DVD encoding.