Abstract
The H.264 video compression standard, aka MPEG 4 Part 10 aka Advanced Video Coding (AVC) allows new flexibility
in the use of video in the battlefield. This standard necessitates encoder chips to effectively utilize the increased
capabilities. Such chips are designed to cover the full range of the standard with designers of individual products given
the capability of selecting the parameters that differentiate a broadcast system from a video conferencing system. The
SmartCapture commercial product and the Universal Video Stick (UVS) military versions are about the size of a thumb
drive with analog video input and USB (Universal Serial Bus) output and allow the user to select the parameters of
imaging to the. Thereby, allowing the user to select video bandwidth (and video quality) using four dimensions of
quality, on the fly, without stopping video transmission. The four dimensions are: 1) spatial, change from 720 pixel x
480 pixel to 320 pixel x 360 pixel to 160 pixel x 180 pixel, 2) temporal, change from 30 frames/ sec to 5 frames/sec, 3)
transform quality with a 5 to 1 range, 4) and Group of Pictures (GOP) that affects noise immunity. The host processor
simply wraps the H.264 network abstraction layer packets into the appropriate network packets. We also discuss the
recently adopted scalable amendment to H.264 that will allow limit RAVC at any point in the communication chain by
throwing away preselected packets.
