Proponents of an emerging video codec called H.264 are predicting the scheme will turn the video market on its head by enabling delivery of Internet Protocol-based broadcast-quality video at data rates of less than 1 Mbit/second. Although demand for H.264 may not hit volume before 2004, the broadcasting industry's interest in the codec has gone way past the talk stage — far enough that MPEG-4, long pitched as the logical interactive enhancement to MPEG-2, could be lost in the shuffle.

The first rumblings of the promised upheaval were felt here last week at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC). Chips, evaluation boards and software tools targeting the H.264 codec (formerly H.26L) trickled into private demonstrations and a few public venues at IBC. Presenters of H.264 previews included Canadian company VideoLocus Inc. and Germany's Heinrich-Hertz-Institut f¼r Nachrichtentechnik Berlin GmbH (HHI). Texas Instruments Inc., in launching its 600-MHz digital media processor, joined with such third-party partners as UB Video Inc. and Ingenient Technologies to show an H.264 video algorithm running on its C64x DSP family. And Equator Technologies similarly claimed its media processor's architecture will be capable of real-time H.264 encoding and decoding.

The yet-to-be-ratified international codec is now officially known as H.264 in the telecommunications world. Some in the MPEG community, however, are calling it MPEG-4 Part 10, and yet a third faction refers to it as "the proposed JVT/AVC standard."