Abstract

Internet broadcasting techniques are wide spread and have been the focus off many research projects. Due to high transmission delays these systems often lack interactivity. This thesis introduces a new streaming system to deliver real-time video and audio data with low-delays across the Internet. Packet loss, jitter and changing bandwidth availability describe the challenges that have to be handled by the system, since the Internet is a best effort network and does not guarantee quality of service. To lower bit-rates audio and video data are usually compressed in formats like MPEG-4. The high compression nearly eliminates redundancy in the audio and video data. A resultant loss of transmitted data and transmission errors can have big impact on the quality of the received stream. MPEG-4 video uses inter frame prediction, so errors propagate between frames. We will argue that retransmission of lost or invalid data is not feasible for low-delay communication due to high control loop delays.