The Media Streaming scenario:

Media contents are taken by grabbing devices. The video is encoded by HHI's H.264/MPEG4-AVC encoder. On the other path the audio content is encoded with HHI's MPEG-4 AAC encoder. Both resulting streams are packetized into RTP [1] and it's Payload Formats for H.264/AVC [2] and AAC. The RTP stream is transported with UDP/IP, which is multiplexed into MPEG-2 TS. At the receiver an MPEG-2 TS demultiplexing has to be performed. The resulting stream is depacketized, decoded and presented in a synchronized way at the client, see also the following figure.

The blue parts of the figure will be delivered by Fraunhofer HHI. The transmission environment have to be provided by third parties.The encoder is supporting the complete H.264/AVC standard [3]. An exact rate control guarantees a smooth stream rate. "Group of Pictures" and "Reference" structures can be easily determined. A high quality fast search algorithm and tools like scene cut detection significantly improve the stream quality.

The audio encoder is supporting AAC only at the moment, but an HE-AAC-encoder can be provided in the beginning of 2005.

The coding part is a fully software based system and has a CIF (352x288) resolution live encoding performance on a 3.4 GHz Pentium PC.

A decoder IP using an Xscale core and a SIMD architecture will be available by mid 2005. This decoder will also be implemented as FPGA and be operational in June 2005.
 
[1] - IETF - RFC 3550, RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Application, July 2003
 
[2] - Wenger, Hannuksela, Stockhammer, Westerland, Singer, RTP payload Format for JVT Video, draft-ietf-avt-rtp-h264-11, Internet Engineering Task Force, August 2004
 
[3] - ITU-T Recommendation H.264 & ISO/IEC 14496-10 AVC, Advanced Video Coding for Generic Audiovisual Services, 2003