• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.205-216
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• 2010

In this paper, a method of MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) multiplexing for Ultra HDTV (UHDTV) and its design and implementation as a SW tool is described. In practice, UHD video may be divided into several HD videos and each video is encoded in parallel. Therefore, it is necessary to synchronize and multiplex multiple bitstreams encoding each HD video for transmitting and storing UHD video. In this paper, it is assumed that 4 HD videos partitioning a UHD spatially are encoded as H.264/AVC and two 5.0 channel audios are encoded by AC-3. Therefore, 4 H.264/AVC elementary streams (ESs) and 2 AC-3 ESs is mainly considered in the TS multiplexing of UHD. For the carriage of H.264/AVC and AC-3 over MPEG-2 TS, PES packetization and TS multiplexing are designed and implemented based on the extended specification of the MPEG-2 Systems and ATSC (Digital audio compressed standard), respectively. The implemented UHD TS multiplexing tool emulates real time HW operation in the time unit corresponding to the duration of one TS packet transmission in a given TS rate. In particular, in order to satisfy the timing model, the buffers defined in the TS System Target Decoder (T-STD) are monitored and their statuses are considered in the scheduling of TS multiplexing. For UHD multiplexing, two kinds of multiplexing structures, which are UHD re-multiplexing and UHD program multiplexing, are implemented and their strength and weakness are investigated. The developed UHD TS multiplexing tool is tested and verified in terms of the syntax and semantics conformance and functionalities by using a commercial analyzer and real-time presentation tools.