Traditionally, video indexing and compression have been considered as two separate functionalities. However, the high amount of available multimedia content creates the need for multimedia services to consider both the compression and the indexing aspects of the content in order to efficiently manage it. Therefore, it is interesting to find new techniques that efficiently exploit the indexing/compression information in order to improve the compression/indexing capabilities of the content. This paper focusses on the development of one technique where the compression efficiency of the H.264 encoder is increased by the use of standard indexing information, called indexing metadata. This indexing metadata, even if extracted or generated to support indexing capabilities, can be exploited to enhance current standard video codecs such as H.264.