MP4 File Creator for SVC Adaptive Video Streaming

With the advances in the Internet and mobile networks, consumers now wish to enjoy their live and on-demand multimedia contents anytime, anywhere and across any device. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) provides a very attractive solution to achieve this goal. However, SVC streams themselves are not stream-able by a streaming server. The SVC streams must be stored in a proper file format to facilitate packet-based streaming. MP4 files are designed to contain timed media for streaming purposes. An MP4 file contains media sample data, sample timing information, and sample packetization information, among which sample times are the most important information. In this paper, we take advantage of the unique SVC hierarchical B-pictures coding structure and propose to use a fixed initial delay ((GOP/2)*duration) for SVC composition times instead of parsing the whole file to find out the proper initial delay. We also propose that sample times of the full SVC streams should be obtained firstly, and then the sample times for SVC sub-streams are simply matched from the sample times of the full SVC streams, instead of calculating sample times for each sub-stream, for both single-RTP-stream and multiple-RTP-stream packetization modes. This paper also highlights and addresses some other key implementation issues of the MP4 creator for SVC adaptive video streaming.