Comparison of H264 and H263 (MPEG-4 part 2) encoding speed

I am working on a application where I need to record high quality live video and am working through which codec is right for me. I am using FFMPEG so the codec needs to be one that I can build into it. Because I would like the video I output to be portable (needs to run on more than just VLC such as windows media player), I am mostly considering H263 (or MPEG-4 part 2) and H264. Due to the extra licensing fee for getting a non-gpl version of libx264 (I am aware of the patent licensing for either) I would prefer H263 if it were comparable. I have seen the estimate H264 produces about half the resulting file size of H263 for similar quality video. While smaller file size would be a nice feature my application does run a little hot on cpu utilization already, so if H264 is going to potentially peg some systems we deploy to it's not worth it (this is why H265 is not on the list at all). I have also seen claims that the encode speed is slower for H264 than H263 but I have been unable to find any actual comparisons to support them.

Any comparisons of the encoding speed of H263 and H264 would be awesome, also if I am totally on the wrong track and should be considering some other codec entirely that would be great as well!

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