Video coding is the field in computer science that deals with finding efficient coding formats for digital video. Video coding has two distinct goals: storing and transmission of video data. These two goals have much in common. Therefore, video file formats usually have the same structure as streaming video formats with just a little header information added. H.264, MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC, for Advanced Video Coding, is the latest digital video codec standard which is noted for achieving very high data compression. The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard that would be capable of providing good video quality at bit rates that are substantially lower (e.g., half or less) than what previous standards would need (e.g., relative to MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), and to do so without so much of an increase in complexity as to make the design impractical (excessively expensive) to implement.
It have been noted that the computational complexity of H.264/AVC video coding standard would be a great obstacle for implementation of real video coding system development. Especially, motion estimation and mode decision which have been adopted for high coding efficiency take almost computation loads. Therefore, the goal of the real-time video coding for H.264/AVC coding standard is to reduce the computational complexity of mode decision which is needed to make a decision of most suitable block type for a macroblock encoding.
