So at the last WG meeting, Sudhakar Shetty of Boeing demonstrated testing that Boeing was kind enough to do that showed the capabilities of H.264, DivX and WM9/VC1. We thank Sudhakar and Boeing for their work.

It is being proposed that we name MPEG-4 Part 10, AVC, also known as H.264, as the codec of choice for IFE. While I am most grateful to Boeing for their demo, and appreciative of the supportive efforts of Sudhakar Shetty and his colleagues, I feel strongly that this recommendation was reached without the benefit of an appropriate requirements document which would have established benchmarks that disqualify this codec in the portable space.

As I said earlier, I was H.264‘s earliest evangelist at these meetings, and have no issue with its suitability in the embedded space. But the proponents of H.264 have been candid from the outset that it was not suitable for use on a battery-powered device. I‘m sure in time that it will be. But I understand that the chips that reduce power consumption are not currently part of the COTS inventory, and until they are, I believe declaring AVC suitable for portables is premature. This is not a solution that can be implemented today. The WG is a consensus group, and if it is the consensus of the WG to force this standard upon the portable world, so be it, but I wish to make my strong exception public.