Video traffic characteristics of modern encoding standards: H.264/AVC with SVC and MVC extensions and H.265/HEVC

Abstract

Video encoding for multimedia services over communication networks has significantly advanced in recent years with the development of the highly efficient and flexible H.264/AVC video coding standard and its SVC extension. The emerging H.265/HEVC video coding standard as well as 3D video coding further advance video coding for multimedia communications. This paper first gives an overview of these new video coding standards and then examines their implications for multimedia communications by studying the traffic characteristics of long videos encoded with the new coding standards. We review video coding advances from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 to H.264/AVC and its SVC and MVC extensions as well as H.265/HEVC. For single-layer (nonscalable) video, we compare H.265/HEVC and H.264/AVC in terms of video traffic and statistical multiplexing characteristics. Our study is the first to examine the H.265/HEVC traffic variability for long videos. We also illustrate the video traffic characteristics and statistical multiplexing of scalable video encoded with the SVC extension of H.264/AVC as well as 3D video encoded with the MVC extension of H.264/AVC.

Figure 1

Block diagram of video network transport system. The captured video frames are encoded and smoothed before network transmission. The evaluations of video transmission consider the rate-distortion (RD) characteristics, the rate variability-distortion (VD) characteristics before and after the smoother, and the required smoother buffer and the link bitrate C _min⁡ requirements.

Figure 2

Illustration of classical B frame prediction structure used in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2 (without reference arrows for even frames to avoid clutter) and dyadic hierarchical B frame prediction structure of H.264/AVC, H.264 SVC, and H.265/HEVC.

Figure 3

Traffic characteristics and link bandwidth requirements for H.264/AVC without and with cascading (C) quantization parameters (QPs) and H.265/HEVC with cascading QPs for Sony video.

Figure 4

Traffic characteristics and link bandwidth requirements for H.265/HEVC with cascading QPs for a variety of videos, as well as comparison of H.265/HEVC (with cascaded QPs) with H.264/AVC (with cascaded QPs) for Tears of Steel (ToS) video.

Figure 5

Illustration of traffic characteristics and link bandwidth requirements for Sony encoded with H.264 SVC with medium-grain scalability (MGS) for base layer QPs B = 35 and 40 and enhancement layer QP E = 25 with and without QP cascading (C), in comparison with H.264/AVC single-layer encoding with cascading QPs.

Figure 6

RD and VD characteristics of MVC encodings without and with cascaded QPs (C) of 35 minutes each of 3D videos Alice in Wonderland and IMAX Space Station with full HD 1920 × 1080 pixel resolution. The encoded left and right views are streamed sequentially (S) or are streamed aggregated (A) into multiview frames.