Principles Underlying the MPEG‐2 Systems Design

This chapter discusses a number of important considerations that ultimately govern the design of moving picture experts group (MPEG) systems. One of the working assumptions when designing MPEG systems has been a constant end‐to‐end delay. To achieve a constant end‐to‐end delay for each elementary stream, delay compensation may be required for multiple associated elementary streams. The delay is caused by a multiplex and demultiplex operation and the video and audio data flow through the buffers. The chapter explains MPEG‐2 system streams and the system target decoder (STD) model, which is a hypothetical model for the decoding of elementary streams contained in an MPEG‐2 system stream. It also explains how to synchronize video and audio at players and how to model the decoding process, and explains the important timing issues in the design of MPEG‐2 systems. The chapter discusses a high quality of service and the importance of transport layer independency.