With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, it was officially approved as a SMPTE standard on April 3, 2006.
It was widely characterized as an alternative to the ITU-T and MPEG video codec standard known as H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.
The main goal of the development and standardization of the VC-1 Advanced Profile was to support interlace-optimized compression of interlaced content without first converting it to progressive scan, making it more attractive to broadcast and video industry professionals using the 1080i format.
[6] The Simple and Main Profiles of VC-1 remained completely faithful to the existing WMV3 implementation, making WMV3 bitstreams fully VC-1 compliant.
The WMV3 codec was designed to primarily support progressive encoding for computer displays.
This codec also supports professional-quality downloadable video with two-pass and variable bit rate (VBR) encoding.
"[7] A number of high definition movies and videos have been released commercially in a format dubbed WMV HD.
These titles are encoded with WMV3 Main Profile @ High Level (MP@HL).
WMVA was the original implementation of WMV Advanced Profile prior to the acceptance of the VC-1 draft by SMPTE.
With the previous version of the Windows Media Video 9 Series codec, users could deliver progressive content at data rates as low as one-third that of the MPEG-2 codec and still get equivalent or comparable quality to MPEG-2[citation needed].
The Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile codec also offers this same improvement in encoding efficiency with interlaced contents[citation needed].
Because VC-1 encoding and decoding requires significant computing power, software implementation that run on a general-purpose CPU are typically slow, especially when dealing with HD video content.