Abstract In this paper, we present a novel approach for active fingerprinting of state of the art video codec H.264/AVC. Tardos probabilistic ngerprinting code is embedded in H.264/AVC video signals using spread spectrum watermarking technique in both luma and chroma. Tardos code is embedded in intra as well as inter frames. The embedding has been performed in the non-zero quantized transformed coe cients (QTCs), which are above a certain threshold while taking into account the reconstruction loop, to avoid the uncontrollable increase in bitrate of video bitstream. A comprehensive analysis of payload and PSNR trade-o ff is presented for benchmark video sequences. Di erent linear and non-linear collusion attacks have been performed in the pixel domain to show the robustness of the proposed approach.