H.264 is an industry standard algorithm used for compressing video for use on the web, mobile phones and digital television.

Video files contain very large amounts of data in comparison to other types of documents found on the web and there is a more video being delivered over the networks that ever before. This includes services and products such as IP TV, film downloads, mobile video calls as well as traditional video as viewed on a web site.H.264 is capable of maintaining the broadcast quality of professional video for use on the web and in digital television while reducing the amount of data that has to be transferred to the viewer.

The Adobe Flash player and Apple's quicktime are both capable of playing video content compressed using H.264.

The H.264 standard also goes under the names MPEG-4 Part 10, MPEG-4 AVC or simply Advanced Video Coding.