Real-Time Streaming and Robust Streaming H.264/AVC Video

Abstract

With the increasingly extensive applications for the new emerging video coding standard, H.264/AVC, it becomes more and more important that we transport H.264/AVC video over MPEG-2 system by exploiting all the existing large amount of the infrastructure of MPEG-2 systems. In this paper, we propose two solutions for it. The key technologies are as follows: firstly we use an H.264/AVC video as an elementary stream of an MPEG-2 system and multiplex it into a TS (transport stream), then extend the T-STD (transport stream-system target decoder) of MPEG-2 standard, so as to transport MPEG-2 TS through Internet and decode it in the client. Ordinarily, the decoded elementary stream should come from a container (a system layer encapsulation including a compression layer), such as AVI. However, we take MPEG-2 TS as a container herein. We encapsulate the H.264/AVC elementary stream into this container in the server, and extract the H.264/AVC video from it to be decoded and be represented. If we use the UDP (user datagram protocol) as a transport protocol, the streaming process will be a real-time one. The experiment result shows that we get a good result, with less than 5% frames whose PSNR<40 dB. We can even get a robust streaming by using the HTTP/TCP (hyper-text transport protocol/transport control protocol) as a transport protocol. All the streaming solutions that we proposed in this paper can also be used for mobile video.