Introduction Since 1997, the ITU-T’s Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) has been working on a new video coding standard with the internal denomination H.26L. In late 2001, the Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) and VCEG decided to work together as a Joint Video Team (JVT), and to create a single technical design called H.264/AVC [1]1, [2]. The standard text has been approved by ITU-T SG16 as Recommendation H.264 in May 2003 and by ISO/IEC as International Standard 14496-10 (MPEG-4 part 10) Advanced Video Coding (AVC) in July 2003. The primary goals of H.264/AVC are improved coding efficiency and improved network adaptation. The syntax of H.264/AVC typically permits a significant reduction in bit-rate [3] compared to all previous standards such as ITU-T Rec. H.263 [4] and ISO/IEC JTC 1 MPEG-4 Visual [5] at the same quality level. The demand for fast and location-independent access to multimedia services offered on today's Internet is steadily increasing. Hence, most current and future cellular networks, like GSM-GPRS, UMTS, or CDMA-2000, contain a variety of packet-oriented transmission modes allowing transport of practically any type of IP-based traffic to and from mobile terminals, thus providing users with a simple and flexible transport interface. The third generation partnership project (3GPP) has selected several multimedia codecs for the inclusion into its multimedia specifications [6]. To provide basic video service in the first release of the 3G wireless systems, baseline H.263 as a mandatory codec and the MPEG-4 visual simple profile as an optional codec have been integrated. The choice was based on the manageable complexity of the encoding and decoding process as well as on the maturity and simplicity of the design.