Video Streaming with H.264 Over the Internet

Abstract

The new video coding standard H264 introduces two different kinds of switching frames, namely SP and SI frames. SP frames are proposed for switching among video streams while SI frames are proposed for error resilience. In this study, we stream H.264 coded video over the Internet in a quality adaptive fashion. Video is pre-encoded in two different rates with SP frames. Depending on network conditions, quality is adapted among two different streams. For error resilience, periodic insertion of I frames is preferred over SI frame retransmission since our path between client and server has large propagation delay. Two different GOP patterns are used to compare the use of SP frames as an alternative to I frames