INTRODUCTION 1.1 Motivation and goals 1.2 Structure of the dissertation 2 OVERVIEW OF H.264 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Terminology 2.3 Profiles and levels 2.4 Coded Data Format 2.5 Reference Pictures 2.6 Slices 2.7 Macroblocks 2.8 Technical overview 2.8.1 Encoder (forward path) 2.8.2 Encoder (reconstruction path) 2.8.3 Decoder 3 INTER PREDICTION Novel methods in H.264/AVC