Deliverable D 1 c Inventory of MPEG - 4 Codecs Public

Video communication is rapidly becoming one of the most important parts of the information infrastructure. Unlike text or image, video communication requires huge volumes of data being transmitted in a timely manner, so highly efficient compression must be used. In order to allow the interrelation among different kinds of terminals and networks to be implemented, a big effort was done in the last decade to standardize the video coding process, resulting in a large number of standards such as: H.261, H.263 and H.263+ from ITU; MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 from ISO and the H.264/AVC. In the BETSY project several video scenarios are presented. According to the scenario characteristics and needs, suitable video codecs need to be selected. This document provides an inventory of MPEG-4 codecs and evaluates the suitability of the different codecs and profiles for our scenarios. The MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple Profile codec appears as a suitable candidate as it provides the needed adaptability to varying bandwidth and processing constraints, while at the same time presenting a good tradeoff in terms of performance and complexity. If the need for higher coding efficiency and resilience capacities justifies a complexity increase, a simple configuration of the Advanced Video Codec (MPEG-4 Part 10) may be taken under consideration.