An MPEG-4/XML FGS approach to multicast video synchronization

The use of XML video representation to handle the video synchronization problem in a layered video multicast system is investigated in this research. MPEG-4/XML was proposed in our previous work [9, 10, 11]. In this work, we first propose an XML scheme to describe the MPEG-4 FGS content. The resulting MPEG-4/XML FGS format is specifically designed for a layered multicast streaming environment. The use of XML tags allows a user to access video contents with more flexibility at the cost of a small overhead in the transmitted file size. The raw XML file can be efficiently compressed to result in a small coded XML file. It is demonstrated that the difficult resynchronization problem in layered video multicast can be effectively dealt with the MPEG-4/XML format.