Experiences with MPEG-4 multimedia streaming

  • Authors:
  • Hassan Shojania;Baochun Li

  • Affiliations:
  • ATI Technologies, Inc.;University of Toronto

  • Venue:
  • MULTIMEDIA '01 Proceedings of the ninth ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

With the advent of next-generation multimedia technologies such as very-low bit rate MPEG-4 codec, multimedia streaming of high-quality video and audio has become a near-term reality. The high compression ratio and error resilience offered by the MPEG-4 standard promise near-term popularity for rich contents and exceptional quality to consumers over affordable Internet connections, such as xDSL, cable modem and 3G wireless networks. Audio and video streaming applications are at the center of such scenarios; and Quality-of-Service (QoS) support in such applications is critical to their widespread acceptance.To the best of our knowledge, there has been no existing open-source MPEG-4 multimedia streaming applications in the academic community, which leads to the lack of research results using MPEG-4 streaming, especially with respect to Quality-of-Service support. In this work, we have implemented an open-source MPEG-4 multimedia streaming testbed in IP-based networks. In this paper, we show our experiences and lessons learned with such a testbed. First, we describe the algorithms and solutions used in our implemention testbed, emphasizing several critical issues. Second, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate measurements of bandwidth requirements and data loss for streaming a set of multimedia samples with different bit rates over UDP, which is ubiquitously available in the TCP/IP protocol stack on all consumer operating systems. Finally, future work for further improvements is also discussed.