An efficient multiplexing approach for MPEG-2 transport stream encoder

This paper introduces an approach that adopts a two-stage multiplexing strategy for MPEG-2 transport stream encoder. The first stage in the proposed approach is responsible for multiplexing the elementary streams while the second stage is responsible for multiplexing the program streams. The function of the first stage is to form a single program transport stream from the elementary streams. It is designed to facilitate synchronization between elementary streams at the receiver. In other words, the transmission of elementary streams is time-interleaved according to the relative presentation time represented by each packet from each stream. On the other hand, the second stage is utilized to multiplex program streams to form a transport stream that conforms to MPEG-2 T-STD buffer requirements. The proposed approach reduces the real-time overhead compared with the other related approaches. Mainly, because other approaches make the multiplexing decision at the transmission time while the proposed approach takes this decision in advance. Hence, it reduces the associated overhead at the transmission time. A prototype of the proposed approach has been implemented in VHDL to evaluate its performance. Additionally, it has proven its effectiveness while testing it with H.264 and AAC codecs that are supported by digital video broadcasting systems.