Performance comparison of MPEG-4 and H.263+ for streaming video applications

MPEG-4 and H.263+ are the two latest video compression standards aimed towards the streaming video-over-Internet application. Both standars include advanced coding techniques to achieve high coding efficiency at low bit rates. They support several requirements of packet-based transmission on the Internet, e.g., scalable video coding and error resilience. MPEG-4 also supports object-based coding tools. It is widely expected that both MPEG-4 and H.263+ will be the two main standards used for delivering streaming video over the Internet. This paper compares the video coding performance of both MPEG-4 and H.263+ standards for this application. This paper also highlights the appropriate combinations of the tools (MPEG-4) and the options (H.263+) that provide good performance for streaming video applications. It is assumed that the reader is generally familiar with the coding tools used in these standards. A brief description of those tools is provided for the sake of completeness.