Bit rate control of internetworking video transcoders

In this paper we address the problem of video internetworking where a compressed bit stream is transmitted through networks of different capacities. Using a video transcoding architecture previously proposed by the authors, an efficient bit rate control algorithm is devised in order to match the bit rate ratio to a given network bandwidth constraint. By using a dynamic control of the transcoding buffer, different compression ratios are achieved for each type of picture in MPEG-2 coded video. It is shown that transcoded picture quality is almost the same as that obtained by directly encoding the uncompressed video at the same lower rates. The proposed algorithm has low latency and is computationally very simple.