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VIDEO FORMATS

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VIDEO FORMATS

who published each standard, when, the names it goes by, and what has to be squeezed

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Standard$1.50

Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
code · everyone · reference · study

The year is the approval date of the named document's first edition; for joint standards the ITU-T date. Rates are width × height × bits × frames.

ONE TEXT, TWO NUMBERS, THREE NAMES

H.264, AVC and MPEG-4 Part 10 are not three codecs, nor three versions of one. They are a single document that two bodies published under their own numbers: the International Telecommunication Union as Recommendation ITU-T H.264, and ISO with the IEC as ISO/IEC 14496-10. The text is the same, a joint team wrote it, and the only difference between the names is whose catalogue you happen to be holding.

H.262 (also MPEG-2 Video), H.265 (also HEVC) and H.266 (also VVC) are built the same way. H.261 and H.263, by contrast, stayed with the ITU-T alone, and MPEG-1 Video and MPEG-4 Part 2 with ISO alone. That is why the table on this sheet has two columns for documents and why one of them is empty on several rows: the blank is an answer, not an omission.

The oldest row managed to rename itself as well. The 1988 first edition of H.261 is titled «Video codec for audiovisual services at p × 384 kbit/s»; the edition in force since 1993 reads «at p × 64 kbit/s» — the same Recommendation under the same number, with a rate eight times lower written into its own name.

On the sheet

  • The year is the approval date of the named document's first edition; for joint standards the ITU-T date. Rates are width × height × bits × frames.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 7 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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