ITU-T Recommendations

Recommendation ITU-T H.264.2 provides accompanying reference software for Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 as an electronic attachment. The software is an integral part of Rec. ITU-T H.264.2.
The purpose of this Recommendation is to provide the following.
• Reference decoder software capable of decoding bitstreams that conform to Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496 10 in a manner that conforms to the decoding process specified in Rec. ITU T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496 10.
• Reference encoder software capable of producing bitstreams that conform to Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496 10.
The use of this reference software is not required for making an implementation of an encoder or decoder in conformance to Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496 10. Requirements established in Rec. ITU T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496 10 take precedence over the behaviour of the reference software.
The edition approved in 2009-05 incorporated changes made to the reference software for Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 advanced video coding. The changes contain improvements of encoder compression capability, bug fixes, speed and memory resource usage improvements, restructuring of the software for readability and ease of software maintenance, and the addition of support for new profiles of ITU-T H.264. The new profiles are from the set of profiles targeting professional applications that were added to Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 in 2007. No changes were made to the text of the Recommendation.
The edition approved in 2010-06 contained improvements of encoder compression capability, bug fixes, speed and memory resource usage improvements, restructuring of the software for readability and ease of software maintenance. In addition, this edition includes support for the Scalable Baseline, Scalable High, Scalable High Intra, Multiview High, and Stereo High profiles. The support for the scalable profiles specified in Annex G of Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 (Scalable Baseline, Scalable High, and Scalable High Intra) and the support for the multiview profiles specified in Annex H of Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10 (Multiview High and Stereo High) are provided in separate software solutions.
This edition approved in 2012-01 has only introduced changes to the reference software of Recommendation ITU T H.264.2 (the text is the same as of the edition approved 2010-06). The changes in the reference software improve the encoder compression capability, fix bugs, and improve speed and memory resource usage. The software was also restructured for better readability and ease of maintenance.
This Recommendation was developed jointly with ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 (MPEG) and corresponds to part of ISO/IEC 14496-5.