Oh god, do we have to go through this every time the discussion of h264 comes up?
H264 is a product of the ITU VCEG. MPEG is a product of the ISO/IEC MPEG--- different standards groups with different personnel, different ways of working, different mandates. You are aware, as a starting point, that there are, in fact, multiple different organizations in the world that call themselves standards bodies?
Why do you think it's called h264 (ie following h263 and h261) rather than MPEG5? You are aware, are you not, that it's technically rather different from MPEG4 (well the part of MPEG4 that refers to standard video, since MPEG4 contains about ten thousand different pieces) --- more different from MPEG4 than MPEG4 is from is from, say, MPEG2?
Let's not mince words here. The essence of what happened is that, two years after the godawful mess that is MPEG4 was finalized, it became clear that the ITU had produced a vastly superior codec. Face-saving was obviously necessary --- the large companies that had thrown so much manpower and so much stupidity at MPEG4 could hardly admit that the much smaller, much more interested in results rather than patent battles ITU group had produced something far superior --- and so we get h264 hustled into an appendix to the MPEG4 spec, creating the fiction that it's somehow an organic outgrowth of MPEG4 and the product of the dysfunctional ISO organization, whereas in fact it has nothing to do with them.
(And no, I did not work on either of these bodies. I'm just reporting the objective facts about what each achieved and the quality of the specs they created. Find a single engineer knowledgeable about this issue who disagrees with my assessment of the relative quality of these specs.)
I mean 99% of the things they release owns everything mobile me and atv were the only fails
