It is important to remember that all codecs have their upsides and downsides. In considering any single algorithm for use the system architect must be aware of all factors and also that it is unlikely that any one codec will be completely ideal for its intended application. Limitations on the bandwidth of any network being used are a very important consideration.

In order to get some real world metrics for compression quality versus file size for each of the codecs, a test setup was created to encode various types of material at different compression rates, such that the resultant files could be examined for both size and video quality after being decompressed.

This white paper has been written to examine two of the more popular video codec technologies, MPEG-4 Part 10 (also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and ITU-T H.264) and JPEG2000.