Audio Video Standard (AVS) is a compression standard for digital audio and digital video, which was meant to compete with AAC audio and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video to potentially replace MP3 audio and MPEG-2 video. Chinese companies own 90% of AVS patents. The audio and video files have an .avs extension as a container format. It never gained widespread use outside China, partly because efforts in other nations at royalty-free video and audio codecs have focused on other codecs such as those developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation or WebM Project and container formats like Matroska, rather than the AVS codecs, since the AVS codecs still require small royalties. However it is a very popular format in China, where it is officially promoted by the government.