Online MPEG-2 Transport Stream multiplexer for .NET

As digital television tends to replace the analog one and with continuous development of new and more automated programming technologies, implementation of digital television processing using these techniques becomes simpler and promises to reduce the time and cost of developing such expensive products. This paper presents the challenges imposed by implementing a real-time MPEG-2 multiplexer with NET using queues and heap data structures and the performance results obtained with the implementation in a high-level language as C#. A fast and flexible algorithm was adapted to construct a constant bit rate multiplexed stream, using multiple flies as program sources. Tests developed on two 700 MHz and 1.6 GHz Pentium processors showed that the implemented multiplexer is able to cope with three and, for the second machine, five real time program streams before processor overload occurred. The portable NET implementation allowed for testing on different systems. Being rather an unusual approach, the C# implementation tries to prove that such an approach is not only possible, but also viable for small, low-cost real time systems.