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 tow ards the streaming video-over-Internet application. Both standards include advanced coding techniques to achieve high coding efficiency at low bit rat es. They support several requirements of packet-based transmission on the I nternet, e.g., scalable video coding and error resilience. MPEG-4 also supp orts 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 o ver the Internet. This paper compares the video coding performance of both MPEG-4 and H.263+ standards for this application. This paper also highlight s the appropriate combinations of the tools (MPEG-4) and the options (H.263 +) that provide good performance for streaming video applications. It is as sumed that the reader is generally familiar with the coding tools used in t hese standards. A brief description of those tools is provided for the sake of completeness.