Spliced Video and Buffering Considerations for Tune-In Time Minimization in DVB-H for Mobile TV
Mehdi Rezaei, Miska M. Hannuksela, Vinod Malamal Vadakital, Moncef Gabbouj · 2006
A novel video splicing method is proposed which minimizes the tune-in time of mobile TV in Digital Video Broadcasting for Handheld terminals (DVB-H). DVB-H uses a time-sliced transmission scheme to reduce the power consumption used for radio reception. Tune-in time in DVB-H refers to the time between the start of the reception of a broadcast signal and the start of the media rendering. One of the significant factors in tune-in time is the time from the start of media decoding to the start of correct output from decoder, which can be minimized when a time-slice is started with a random access point picture such as an independent decoding refresh (IDR) picture in H.264/AVC. In IP datacasting (IPDC) over DVB-H, the encapsulation to time-slices is performed independently from encoding in a network element called IP encapsulator. At the time encoding, time-slice boundaries are not known exactly, and it is impossible to govern the location of IDR pictures relative to time-slice boundaries. It is proposed that an additional stream consisting of IDR pictures only is transmitted to the IP encapsulator, which replaces pictures in a normal bitstream with IDR pictures according to time-slice boundaries in order to achieve the minimum tune-in time. It has to be ensured that the "spliced" stream resulting from the operation of the IP encapsulator complies with the Hypothetical Reference Decoder (HRD) specification of H.264/AVC.