[M4IF Technotes] MPEG-4 Simple profile ?

[Priti Patil]

Hello,
I'm going through the archive for answering some questions
I have and here is the context...
-----Original Message-----
Hi Gigi,
Visual Simple Profile isn't identical to H.263 baseline, but
there is a subset (called "short header mode") that is the
same.  So if you have an MPEG-4 Simple Profile decoder,
you should be able to decode an H.263 baseline bitstream
(minor header conversion may be needed, but it's easy).
In general, a Simple Profile Bitstream won't work on an H.263
decoder, unless it's specifically restricted to short header
mode.
-Ralph
-----------------------------------
Now, here are my questions:
1.  Why would a simple profile bitstream with short header
     work with a H.263 decoder?
My understanding is that the simple profile bitstream
would still contain VOSheaders, VOL and VOP data before
the VO bitstream starts with its short header...  So how would
an H.263 decoder be able to understand all that data?
Also, based on following link, even the simple profile
level 0 (this is the one with short header) would need some
amount of transcoding to be played with H263 decoder.
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/S.Dogan/pubs/EMPS_1998.pdf
2. Where to get the short header conformance bit stream from?
3. Which publicly available players play the mp4v streams with
    simple profile level 0?
4. In quicktime, they have a way to store H.263 frames under
   stsd as 'h263' atom type. Is there any s/w available which would
   create such files?  (so that older clients can play them)
Thanks
Priti