Quality of Service for Internet Multimedia

Chapter 6. Source Priority Packetization and Rate Adaptation for MPEG-4 Video

Introduction

Streaming media applications over IP networks are attracting ever-increasing attention as the enabling technology for future multimedia distribution. Streaming offers significant improvements over the download-and-play approach for on- and offline media forwarded from a media server. Users may have different preferences and processing capabilities, and diverse means of network access to the streaming media server. For streaming video, particularly, this user and network heterogeneity requires both highly scalable video coding and flexible delivery techniques to overcome the challenges imposed by best-effort Internet service.

The current unpredictable channel ...