The international committee of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) jointly with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organization, collectively, Joint Video Team (JVT) have defined a standard for the next generation of video CODECs, the H.264 standard.

The recently added MPEG-4 part 10, also known as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) or H.264, offers significantly greater compression than its predecessors. It can provide DVD-quality video at under 40% of the bit rate of MPEG-2 and is considered promising for full-motion video over wireless, satellite, and ADSL Internet connections.  The MPEG-4 part 10 standard defines the decoding algorithms and techniques and also provides reference code for developers to utilize either in their coding implementation or for bench-marking.  Because of its multi-disciplinary origins, experts agree that H.264 will be the dominant video compression standard for the next 8 to 10 years.

Many companies decided to use the published reference code to support their development efforts and improve upon that code but have run into major road blocks.  Many of these companies have had to rethink their efforts and are now going back to the drawing board or looking for alternatives.  The H .264 algorithms are so designed that the encoding process contains more complexities than the decoding process. While the standard determines the decoding algorithm, the design of encoding algorithms is open to individual developers, allowing them to create value-added programs.  VidWare technology is a way for these companies to recoup their time-to-market. 

VidWare decided to entirely rewrite the code from the ground up without incorporating any reference code, nor making it platform-specific.  The use of VidWare proprietary technology improves well beyond the performance of the H.264 reference code, while respecting the standard.