Evaluation of H.264/AVC error resilience in HD IPTV applications

The delivery of High Definition Television (HDTV) over IP networks, namely the HD IPTV, has emerged as one of the major distribution and access techniques for broadband multimedia services. IPTV adopts H.264/AVC as its coding standard due to its high video compression efficiency as well as powerful error resilience features. This paper presents studies on some of these features applied to HD IPTV applications. A test system is deployed to simulate the delivery of HD video over a DSL based IPTV network. Effects of error resilience of slicing and Instantaneous Decoding Refreshing (IDR) features on video quality are examined in both channel non-impaired and channel impaired with burst noise circumstances. Based on the acquired results, optimal slice size was obtained for HD video transmission over an impaired channel. The quality of experience related to the IDR interval in combating error propagation was also characterized.