Efficient Media Synchronization Mechanism for SVC Video Transport over IP Networks

The scalable extension of H.264, known as scalable video coding (SVC) has been the main focus of the Joint Video Team's work and was finalized at the end of 2007. Synchronization between media is an important aspect in the design of a scalable video streaming system. This paper proposes an efficient media synchronization mechanism for SVC video transport over IP networks. To support synchronization between video and audio bitstreams transported over IP networks, a real‐time transport protocol/RTP control protocol (RTP/RTCP) suite is usually employed. To provide an efficient mechanism for media synchronization between SVC video and audio, we suggest an efficient RTP packetization mode for inter‐layer synchronization within SVC video and propose a computationally efficient RTCP packet processing method for inter‐media synchronization. By adopting the computationally simple RTCP packet processing, we do not need to process every RTCP sender report packet for inter‐media synchronization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism by comparing its performance with that of the conventional method.