3DTV over IP

In this paper, technologies for distribution of a variety of three-dimensional (3-D) video and 3-D TV services over IP networks are described. The approaches for encoding stereoscopic and MW have been standardized in the form of MPEG "video-plus-depth" and the JVT MVC standards. It has been shown that both approaches can encode stereoscopic video at about 1.2 times the bit rate of monoscopic video (when using unequal inter-view bit allocation in the case of MVC). Also this kind of interactive system increases the bandwidth requirement significantly. A multitude of strategies have been considered for streaming such encoded MW using RTP/UDP/IP or RTP/DCCP/IP. Video streaming architectures can be classified as 1) server unicasting to one or more clients, 2) server multicasting to several clients, 3) P2P unicast distribution, where each peer forwards packets to another peer, and 4) P2P multicasting, where each peer forwards packets to several other peers.