Stereoscopic Video over IP Networks

Transfers of high-quality multimedia content pose new demands on capacity and services provided by the contemporary high-speed computer networks. Transfer of stereoscopic video is a specific example, as it needs synchronization between two separate data streams. We have set up a stereoscopic video capture system and studied synchronization of two separate digital video format streams sent over packet networks. We have adapted application tools to support the synchronization and used an active element working as a synchronizing UDP packet reflector to explicitly synchronize the streams if they are desynchronized in the network. We have experimentally studied the quality of achievable synchronization and the relationship between the amount of desynchronization and the additional latency overhead posed by buffering of the data on the synchronizing reflector. The results prove our assumption that even high-quality DV streams can be successfully synchronized using the simple packet reflector running on common IA32-based computer