MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based video compression standard. As of 2014, it is one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content.

MPEG-4 codes frame-based video with increased efficiency: about 50% less rate for the same perceptual quality regarding existing standards such as H.263, MPEG-2 Video and MPEG-4 Visual. This standard offers also good flexibility in terms of compression efficiency-complexity trade-offs as well as good performance in terms of error resilience for mobile environments and fixed and wireless Internet (both progressive and interlaced formats).

As usual for MPEG standards, H.264/AVC specifies only the bitstream syntax and semantics as well as the decoding process. It allows several types of encoder optimizations and reduces the encoding implementation complexity, but it does not allow to guarantee any minimum level of quality which depends on the encoder implementations.

To address the need for flexibility and customizability, the H.264/AVC design covers a Video Coding Layer (VCL), which is designed to efficiently represent the video content and a Network Abstraction Layer (NAL), which packages the VCL representation and provides header information in a manner appropriate for conveyance by a variety of transport layers or storage media.