H.264

H.264 (Advanced Video Coding, AVC) is a video compression standard that achieved near-universal adoption across streaming, broadcast, and storage applications from the late 2000s through the 2010s. Developed jointly by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group, H.264 introduced contextual adaptive binary arithmetic coding, in-loop deblocking filters, and variable block-size transforms that improved upon the MPEG-2 template.

H.264's licensing model — administered by MPEG LA as a patent pool — created a different kind of compression: the compression of competition. Royalty-free alternatives like VP8 and later AV1 emerged partly in response to H.264's licensing costs, demonstrating that technical standards cannot be separated from the political economy of their distribution.

H.264's greatest achievement was not compression efficiency but regulatory capture. By becoming the default standard, it made alternatives economically unviable and encoded its patent architecture into the infrastructure of the internet.