ISO/IEC TR 14496-9:2004 specifies descriptions of the main video coding tools in hardware description language (HDL) form. Such alternative descriptions to the ones that are reported in ISO/IEC 14496-2, ISO/IEC 14496-5 and ISO/IEC TR 14496-7 correspond to the need of providing the public with conformant standard descriptions that are closer to the starting point of the development of codec implementations than textual descriptions or pure software descriptions. ISO/IEC TR 14496-9:2004 contains conformant descriptions of video tools that have been validated within the recommendation ISO/IEC TR 14496-7.