Video compression is the scientific discipline that employs techniques that exploit the limitations in the human visual system (HVS) along with lossy or lossless compression techniques in order to reduce the bit rate of the video streams.

ITU-T Rec. H.264 (pdf)

MVC

Codecs

• JSVM stands for Joint Scalable Video Model and is the reference software for the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) project. The source code can be obtained through CVS. For more details go here.
  
• JM is the reference software for H.264/AVC. The source code and documentation can be found here or here.
  
• KTA is a brainchild of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and is based on the JM reference software. The source code can be obtained here.