Conventional Transcoder

Abstract

The H.264/AVC video compression standard offers over two times higher compression rate than what the MPEG-2 can offer, while maintaining the same visual quality. Additionally, H.264/AVC offers a substantial network adaptation capability, which is essential for many network dependent video applications, e.g. delivering Digital TV (DTV) programs over the Internet and video conferencing. For that reason, the relativity new H.264/AVC standard has been pushed to the top of the candidate stack for coding Digital TV programs at a bit-rate lower than the MPEG-2’s bit-rate. However, for over a decade now, most of the video resources have been encoded in MPEG-2 format. As a result, the heterogeneous transcoding solution, MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC, becomes necessary for distributing video resources specially over the Internet. In the following section, we will discuss the current employed MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC transcoding solution in the video industry.