Practical low delay broadcast of compressed variable bit rate movies

H.264 is currently the best way to compress media to achieve high quality at low bandwidth. Since its inception, technologies such as video-on-demand are increasingly realizable. Periodic broadcast is a popular way of implementing video-on-demand, yet most current methods do not work on H.264 because they assume a constant bit rate stream and do not account for B frames. In this paper, we describe a new protocol for periodic broadcast of video-on-demand that works for variable bit rate streams with B frames. We map the periodic broadcast problem into the generalized windows scheduling problem of arbitrary length jobs on parallel machines. Our method is lossless and practical, in that it does not require channels of differing bandwidth. We apply our method to H.264 encoded video traces and achieve a delay of under 10 seconds on a 1.5 Mbps channel