Whitepaper:
The H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) Standard
What It Means to Web Camera Performance
Introduction
A new generation of webcams is hitting the market that makes video conferencing a more lifelike experience for users,
thanks to adoption of the breakthrough H.264 standard. This white paper explains some of the key benefits of H.264
encoding and why cameras with this technology should be on the shopping list of every business.
The Need for Compression
Today, Internet connection rates average in the range of a few megabits per second. While VGA video requires 147
megabits per second (Mbps) of data, full high definition (HD) 1080p video requires almost one gigabit per second of data, as illustrated in Table 1.
Table 1. Display Resolution Format Comparison
Format
Horizontal Pixels
Vertical Lines
Pixels
Megabits per second (Mbps)
QVGA
320
240
76,800
37
VGA
640
480
307,200
147
720p
1280
