Performance of MPEG-4 Profiles used for streaming video

To allow interoperability and cost effective implementation of codecs, MPEG has defined Profiles and Levels as conformance points. Two of those Profiles are Simple Profile (SP) and Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). ASP is also used as base level for the Fine Granularity Scalability (FGS) Profile. Applications related to streaming video on Internet are expected to use these profiles. In this paper we compare the performance of Simple and Advanced Simple Profiles at different levels. Results show that, for difficult to compress video, SP can be significantly inefficient by requiring as many as about 50% more bits. Also, for full resolution video, ASP at Level 4 can provide significantly better end-to-end quality than ASP at Level 3.