I am developing an IP camera that streams video using RTP. The hardware encoder I'm using only supports H.264, but I need to generate a MJPEG stream as well as an H.264. I've done a fair bit of reading on H.264's I-Frame and it seems to me that the compression they use is very very similar to JPEG. In fact, I'm not clear what the difference is. So my question is, can I produce a MJPEG stream our of an I-Frame-only H.264 stream?
Depends on what “create” means in this sentence. Yes, you can transcode an h264 IDR to a JPG, but you must decode it and re encode it. The formats are created using similar techniques, but the specific implementations are vastly different.