AVS video standard is developed by the Audio Video Coding Standard Working Group of China (AVS working group in short), which was approved by the Chinese Science and Technology Department of Ministry of Information Industry in June 2002. The mandate of the AVS working group is to establish the China's national standards for compression, manipulation and digital right management in digital audio and video multimedia equipment and systems. AVS working group has finished the first version of AVS video standard in December 2003 [I],an d expects to be approved as a national standard in 2004. This version mainly targets at high definition and high quality digital broadcasting, digital storage media and other related applications. It can be also applied in existing standard definition applications. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the basic architecture of AVS video codec and its features. Section 3 describes some key techniques adopted in AVS video standard. Section 4 explains the profile and the levels defined in the current AVS video specification. Finally, the experimental results are given in Section 5.