Variable bit rate DV streaming with TCP-friendly rate control

Digital video (DV) is one of the most popular high quality video formats. Some applications benefit from real-time DV streaming. However, the huge data rate of this digital video format brings some challenges to deliver a digital video stream over the Internet or intranet. In this paper, a variable bit rate DV streaming system with TCP-friendly rate control is implemented. In order to reduce the sending rate when congestion occurs, the proposed scheme discards some high frequency coefficients of a DV frame without touching the audio and system data or reduces the frame rate. The data of one DV frame can be reduced up to 31.5%. Combining frame reduction with high frequency coefficients discarding, the proposed system can provide several data rate levels that the TCP-friendly rate control can select to adapt to the current available network bandwidth. Through the experimental results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our DV streaming system.