Olympics MPEG2 Transport Streams

Amarnath Mukherjee and A. Adas

Abstract

MPEG2 Transport Streams are needed for testing packet video transmission equipment.  Samples from the Olympics MPEG2 Traffic Library consist of broadcast quality packet video,  most between 20-40 minutes long with no packet loss.

1.0 Introduction

During the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the Olympic Village was provided with: (i) the Scarlet video network for  live television coverage, and  (ii) a data network for  up-to-date scores, schedules and web-access.

The Scarlet video network was installed and run by Scientific Atlanta, Bell South and Panasonic. The data network was installed and run by IBM.  This article describes a  data collection project over the Scarlet video network. The objective was to archive the data for research, development, testing, and educational applications.

2.0 The Measurement System

A simplified block diagram of the Scarlet video network is shown below. Transmission from twelve different venues were digitized and encoded as MPEG2 Transport Streams [1], and transmitted to the Olympic village over a Hybrid-Fiber Coax (HFC) network.   

We tapped the data at the input to one of Scientific Atlanta's Broadband Integrated Gateways (BIGs).  Using  the SWIF Protocol (SWIF == Single Wire Interface),  they were transmitted to a PC. Each channel in the transport stream operated at  approximately 6Mbps -- individual channels were made constant bit-rate with null-padding. The data capture did not incur packet loss.

3.0 The Datasets

Datasets for individual events were limited to a maximum duration  of   40 minutes (because of the 2GB MS-DOS file-size limit on the PC).  The following is a list of datasets in the Samples library.

References

1. ISO/IEC 13818: "Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio, Recommendation H.222," November 1994. (The MPEG2 Standard. The datasets collected followed 13818-1 (System), 13818-2 (Video), and 13818-3 (Audio) standards.)

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