AVC video codec technical design complete

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The Joint Video Team (JVT) — a cooperative effort of VCEG (the ITU’s Video Coding Experts Group) and MPEG (the ISO’s Moving Pictures Experts Group) — has completed the technical design of the MPEG-4 AVC video codec. Garry Sullivan, the chairman of JVT and VCEG, told News.com:

Completing the technical design is a key milestone towards making this important standard available to the industry at large. It’s testimony to the efforts of the overall team that the technical design was completed in record time, paving the way for adoption of this exciting technology in 2003.

This is great news for MPEG-4. Now the AVC techinical design just needs to be formally ratified, which the JVT believes can happen by March 17. MPEG LA’s AVC “essential patents” submission deadline is currently January 31, but an insider tells me that this date may get pushed back again, and that could push back the ratififcation date as well.

Proactive software developers are working on their AVC implementations now. It’s especially important for the future success of QuickTime that Apple jump on the AVC bandwagon ASAP, since QuickTime 6’s MPEG-4 Video encoder is currently the most popular , but lowest-quality, MPEG-4 Video encoder out there. | News.com: Speedy net video codec done, but late