Transmission of MPEG-4 video over the Internet

This paper discusses issues related to the delivery of MPEG-4 video over packet-switched networks. Both passive techniques that conceal the effects of packet loss in the decoding process and active techniques that reconstruct lost packets are described. MPEG-4's built-in error resilience capabilities such as flexible re-synchronization markers, data partitioning, header protection, and reversible VLCs are specifically designed to improve the video quality on error-prone networks. Combined with MPEG-4's support for low bitrate video, these techniques make MPEG-4 a perfect candidate for use on the Internet. Methods for using these techniques to build a "network-smart" decoder are discussed, in addition, methods that use Reed-Solomon codes to reconstruct lost packets are also presented. The effectiveness and overheads of the various error resilience techniques and forward error correction techniques are compared using objective video quality measures such as PSNR.