H.264 is MPEG4 part 10 or MPEG4 Advanced Video Coding (MPEG4 AVC). H.264 is the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) name for the standard, and MPEG4 part 10 is the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) name for the same standard.
The purpose in creating this standard was to "...to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (e.g. half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement." (Wikipedia article) Here is another comparison: "MPEG-4 Part 10 is a standard for video Compression. MPEG-4 Part 2 (ASP and SP), which includes implementations like DivX and XviD, was originally designed with video conferencing and other relatively primitive types of video. MPEG-4 Part 10 was designed specifically with High Definition (HD) video for home theater applications in mind as one potential application. It also includes specifications for lower quality video for portable devices, allowing a single standard to be compatible across a wide variety of devices and applications." http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/mpeg_4_part_10.cfm
There are no public domain codecs that compare favorably with H.264 as far as streaming video is concerned. As far as proprietary codecs, here is a subjective comparison of video codecs http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/pdf/msu_subjective_codecs_comparison_en.pdf. As the table on page 31 summarizes, the public domain encoder for H.264 performs substantially better than other codecs, including WMV.
There are no public domain streaming video servers that serve H.264.
On the proprietary side, Flumotion looks interesting, but I haven't been able to find any pricing information on their website.
Here are the prices given me by Adobe:
Cost (Education MSRP) · FMS Streaming $796 / plus optional platinum support = $159 (1yr of coverage). This includes upgrade protection & tech support.
Here is a features list. Here is a description of the support.
This price does not include video encoding software. Adobe sells an encoding server for $5,200. However, there are a number of public domain encoding tools based on the excellent x264 encoder.
Adobe also offers these specifications for the hardware:
Linux Linux Red Hat® 4, or 5 (32-bit only) Hardware requirements . 3.2GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 processor (dual Intel Xeon® or faster recommended) . 2GB of RAM (4GB RAM recommended) . 1GB Ethernet cardIn their literature, Linux outperforms Windows significantly
In this case, the advantages of H.264 over other encoding schemes is clear. It enables us to serve similar video quality at half the bitrate. It runs on Linux. It is a supported and widely adopted standard. And it is inexpensive.
One of the things that helps in all this is that ISO and ITU-T are powerful organizations, and MPEG and VCEG are known for good work. That helped with the quality of the standard, the readiness to adopt it, and the lack of competition. It made things clear, which is good for us.
For video codecs we can probably depend upon MPEG and ITU-T to produce the next standard. We can also expect that that standard will be widely adopted. There are many comparisons published on the web, both between different versions of the same standard (i.e. between MPEG-2 and MPEG4 part 10) and between different codecs. We will be able to judge whether the improvement in quality and performance is worth changing our software platform.
One thing that makes the Adobe Flash Server attractive is that it supports the MPEG4 part 10 standard. I think we should be wary of proprietary encoding schemes.