Broadband MPEG-2 Client with Network Configuration Capability

  • Authors:

  • Anssi J. Huttunen;Irek Defée

  • Affiliations:

  • Digital Media Institute, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, FIN-33101, Tampere, Finland;Digital Media Institute, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, FIN-33101, Tampere, Finland. defee@cs.tut.fi

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

MPEG-2 is a standard for high quality-content compression and data delivery used in digital television and DVD. MPEG-2 is computationally complex but recently it has become possible to perform MPEG-2 decoding in software using multimedia instruction sets of modern microprocessors. This is an important step for the convergence of computers with television and entertainment. In this paper we describe operation and performance of a broadband video client which is MPEG-2 transport stream decoder with network interfaces, implemented on Sun UltraSparc processor using VIS multimedia instruction set. The decoder performs demultiplexing, synchronized video and audio decompression and display in realtime. It is implemented as a Netscape plug-in and it has flexible network interface allowing to configure it for different broadband networks which might be available: ATM PVC, SVC, IP over ATM and Fast Ethernet. Implementation of the decoder in multithreaded and multiprocessing environment is studied. Experimental data regarding the performance of the decoder in different conditions are presented and basing on them conclusions for the processing power requirements are formulated.