What is the difference between H.264 and x.264?

Question

I'm new to video compression; but I see many of the terms repeated over and over again. I'm wondering what's the difference between x.264 and libx264 and H.264?

Answer 1

H.264 is video encoding method, an alias name for MPEG-4 AVC compression, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, defined in joint ISO/IC and ITU specification "Information technology — Coding of audio-visual objects — Part 10: Advanced Video Coding".

The specification is freely available here: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-201304-I/en

x264 is a library implementing video compression and producing H.264 compatible stream.

See also:

• What is ffmpeg, avcodec, x264?