Apple: we have seen the future, and it is H.264

You won't find it on the periodic table, but soon enough you may just find it everywhere else. It's not every day one gets excited about a video codec, but H.264 is just such a codec. It is waiting, or rather eagerly panting, at the sidelines to take over from the current MPEG-2 video standard.

The H.264 standard has already been adopted by over 120 companies, including Motorola, Intel, British Telecom, Samsung and DirecTV. There are over 200 products currently in development before the codec has even shipped in any significant volume. Why? It can deliver DVD quality video at half the data rate. It also has the ability to scale quite gracefully from limited bandwidth apps such as 3G cell phones all the way up to HD video streams, the mother of bandwidth-hogs.

H.264 will be making a big splash when it rolls out in Tiger later this year. It will be an integral part of applications such as Quicktime 7, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime-based third-party applications. Confidence in H.264's wide adoption comes from the fact that it is an industry standard, and not any one company's proprietary technology. Said Frank Casanova, Apple's director of QuickTime marketing, "Windows Media, while good looking, is not a standard and it's just not going to play a role in this space... we are not trying to compete with the standard the way Microsoft is."