DVB Adopts H.264/AVC & HE AAC Codecs

6th December 2004

The H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and HE AAC (High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) codecs have been adopted by DVB in addition to the currently supported MPEG-2 video and MPEG audio Layer II codecs. The revisions to the ETSI TS 101 154 specification document, which deals with implementation guidelines for video and audio codecs on DVB, will be forwarded to ETSI for standardisation.

The H.264/AVC (also known as MPEG-4 part 10) video codec is approximately twice as efficient as the MPEG-2 codec, and the HE AAC codec is approximately 2.5 times as efficient as the MPEG audio Layer II codec.