A frame-work for live multicast of video streams over the Internet

This paper presents a frame-work for live multicast of video streams over the Internet. The overall system combines a scalable video compression algorithm, a cheap software only real-time video encoder and decoder, and a network unit. The scalable compression algorithm produces an embedded bit-stream to support decoders with various spatial and temporal resolutions. Bandwidth scalability with a dynamic range from a few Kbps to several Mbps is provided. The subjective quality of compressed frames improves significantly by the use of perceptual distortion measures. For cheap software only encoding and decoding we use hierarchical table-lookup vector quantization. Multiple multicast groups are used for the delivery of the scalable streams over the Internet.