He is also author of Optimizing Applications for Multi-Core Processors, from which this article is adapted. Copyright (c) 2007 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. The two series of video codec nomenclature H.26x and MPEG-x overlap. MPEG-2 is named H.262 in the H.26x scheme. Likewise, another popular codec, H.264, is a subset of MPEG-4 also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC). Its intent, like that of all of MPEG-4, was to produce video compression of acceptable quality and very low bit-rate -- around half of its predecessors MPEG-2 and H.263.