It is similar but not the same (I believe - I am not familiar with H.263).
The patent itself describes the difference between this idea and other Multi stream encodings. This idea can be applied to MPEG2 or any lossy codec and it also covers sending the enhancement data at different times and by different routes to the main data unlike other multistream/pyramid encoding approaches which expect simultaneous generation and transmission of the streams.
The patent itself describes the difference between this idea and other Multi stream encodings. This idea can be applied to MPEG2 or any lossy codec and it also covers sending the enhancement data at different times and by different routes to the main data unlike other multistream/pyramid encoding approaches which expect simultaneous generation and transmission of the streams.