Streaming Audio and Video

By
Mrs Parimala G
Assistant Professor
 OUTLINE
Introduction
Digital Audio
Digital Video
Streaming Stored Media
Streaming Live Media
Real-Time Conferencing
 STREAMING AUDIO AND VIDEO
A one-way audio transmission over a data network is widely
used to listen to audio clips and radio from the Internet on
computers, tablets and smartphones.
With streaming, the media file being played on the client
device is stored remotely, and is transmitted a few seconds at
a time over the Internet.
Two things happened to enable this growth.
First, computers have became much more powerful and are
equipped with microphones and cameras so that they can
input, process, and output audio and video data with ease.
Second, a flood of Internet bandwidth has come to be
available.
The result was an explosion of voice data carried over
Internet networks that is called voice over IP or
Internet telephony.
What is the difference between streaming and
downloading?
Streaming is real-time, and it's more efficient than
downloading media files.
The term multimedia is also called as streaming
media.
 Audio Streaming:
Audio Streaming is a technology that allows the steaming of audio
files, such as music or voice-overs to your computer over the
Internet.
Usually, first we need to download an audio file in a format like
MP3, WAV, WMA etc. if we want to listen to music, or any other
type of audio.
However, in case of audio streaming there’s no need to download
the whole audio file first.
In audio streaming, the audio file is delivered in small “packets”.
As the data arrives it is buffered for a few seconds and then
playback begins.
More data is constantly arriving (or streaming) as the audio is
playing and stream of these packets delivered to our
computer/mobile phone, without any disruptions.
 1. Digital Audio
Digital audio is a technology that is used to record,
store, manipulate, generate and reproduce sound using
audio signals that have been encoded in digital form.
An audio (sound) wave is a one-dimensional acoustic
(pressure) wave.
Example: Microphone
Frequency : dB (decibels)
Digital audio is a digital representation of an audio
wave that can be used to recreate it. Audio waves can
be converted to digital form by an ADC (Analogto-
Digital Converter).
The reverse process takes digital values and produces
an analog electrical voltage. It is done by a DAC
(Digital-to-Analog Converter).

The error introduced by the finite number of bits per

sample is called the quantization noise.
Audio compression is the process of reducing a
Audio Compression

signal's dynamic range. Dynamic range is the

difference between the loudest and quietest parts of
an audio signal.
All compression systems require two algorithms:
Encoding : compressing the data at source
Decoding : decompressing it at the destination
Compression algorithms exhibit certain asymmetries.
For many applications, a multimedia document will only
be encoded once but will be decoded thousands of
times.
The encode/decode process need not be invertible
We have concentrate on audio as sent over the Internet,
which is typically closer to CD-quality. It is also
desirable to reduce the data rates for this kind of audio.
Many audio compression algorithms are:
 MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3)
 AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) / MP4 (MPEG-4)
Audio compression can be done in two ways:
 waveform coding
 perceptual coding
The key property of perceptual coding is that some sounds
can mask other sounds. Those are 2 types:
 Frequency masking
 temporal masking
 2. Digital Video
Digital video is an electronic representation of
moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded
digital data.
The simplest digital representation of video is a pixels.
‘‘black-and-white’’ video : 8 bits per pixel to represent 256
gray levels
color video: 8 bits for each of the red, green and blue
(RGB) primary color components.
The aspect ratio, or width to height ratio, of 4:3, is the
same as a standard television.
HDTV (High-Definition TeleVision) videos can be
downloaded with 1280 by 720 pixels.
 Video Compression
Video Compression is the term used to define a
method for reducing the data used to encode
digital video content.
The most popular encoding is MPEG in its various
forms.
A video is just a sequence of images (plus sound).
To a first approximation, MPEG is just the JPEG
encoding of each frame, plus some extra features for
removing the redundancy across frames.
The JPEG Standard:
The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
standard for compressing continuous-tone still
pictures was developed by photographic experts
Step 1 :block preparation:
For the sake of specificity, let us assume that the JPEG input is a 640
× 480 RGB image with 24 bits/pixel.
The eye is much more sensitive to the luminance, or brightness,
of video signals than the chrominance, or color, of video signals.
 Luminance: Y= 16 + 0.26R + 0.50G + 0.09B
 chrominance :
 Cb = 128 + 0.15R − 0.29G − 0.44B

 Cr = 128 + 0.44R − 0.37G + 0.07

Step 2: JPEG encoding: It is to apply a DCT
(Discrete Cosine Transformation) to each of the
7200 blocks separately.
step 3: Quantization: in which the less important
DCT coefficients are wiped out.
Step 4 : reduces the (0, 0) value of each block (the one
in the upper-left corner) by replacing it with the amount
it differs from the corresponding element in the previous
block.
Step 5 : linearizes the 64 elements and applies run-
length encoding to the list. Scanning the block from left
to right and then top to bottom will not concentrate the
zeros together, so a zigzag scanning pattern is used.
Step 6 : Huffman-encodes the numbers for storage or
transmission, assigning common numbers shorter
codes than uncommon ones.
The MPEG Standard
MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) standards.
Though there are many proprietary algorithms.
MPEG can compress both audio and video.
MPEG-1 standard: it (which includes MP3 audio)
was first published in 1993 and is still widely used. Its
goal was to produce video-recorder-quality output that
was compressed 40:1 to rates of around 1 Mbps. This
video is suitable for
The MPEG-2 standard: it was released in 1996, was
designed for compressing broadcast-quality video.
DVD quality video is typically encoded at rates of 4–8
Mbps.
MPEG-4 standard has two video formats.
The first format, released in 1999, encodes video with an
object-based representation. This allows for the mixing
of natural and synthetic images and other kinds of
media.
The second format, released in 2003, is known as H.264
or AVC (Advanced Video Coding). This encoder is used
for HDTV on most Blu-ray discs.
MPEG output consists of three kinds of frames:
 I- (Intracoded) frames: self-contained compressed still pictures.
 P- (Predictive) frames: block-by-block difference with the previous
frames.
 B- (Bidirectional) frames: block-by-block differences between
previous and future frames.
Audio and video services can be categorized into three broad categories:
streaming stored audio/video, streaming live audio/video, and interactive
audio/video. Streaming means a user can listen (or watch) the file after
the downloading has started.
In the first category, streaming stored audio/video,
the files are compressed and stored on a server. A
client downloads the files through the Internet. This
is sometimes referred to as on-demand audio/video.
In the second category, streaming live audio/video
refers to the broadcasting of radio and TV programs
through the Internet.
In the third category, interactive audio/video refers
to the use of the Internet for interactive audio/video
applications. A good example of this application is
Internet telephony and Internet teleconferencing.
 3. Streaming Stored Media
The most common example of this is watching videos
over the Internet. This is one form of VoD (Video on
Demand).
The Internet is full of music and video sites that stream
stored media files.
The page linked to the movie is not the actual movie file.
Instead, it is what is called a metafile.
Ex: rtsp://joes-movie-server/movie-0025.mp4
In the above example, the media server uses RTSP (Real Time
Streaming Protocol), as indicated by the scheme name rtsp.
The media player has four major jobs to do:
1. Manage the user interface.
2. Handle transmission errors.
3. Decompress the content.
4. Eliminate jitter.
The main commands provided by RTSP are
 4. Streaming Live Media
Live streaming refers to online streaming media
simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real time. It
is often referred to simply as sreaming.
Live streaming is used for an online presence by major
television stations. This is called IPTV (IP
TeleVision).
 It is also used to broadcast radio stations like the BBC.
This is called Internet radio.
There is one important case in which UDP and multicast can be used for streaming.
 5. Real-Time Conferencing
Voice traffic is now carried using Internet
technologies, and represents only a tiny fraction of the
network bandwidth. This disruptive technology is
known as voice over IP, and also as Internet
telephony.
There are two protocols that are widely used for this
purpose, H.323 and SIP.
H.323: Visual Telephone Systems and Equipment for
Local Area Networks Which Provide a Non-
Guaranteed Quality of Service.
SIP—The Session Initiation Protocol
 IETF set up a committee to design a simpler and more modular
way to do voice over IP.
 The major result to date is SIP (Session Initiation Protocol).
The latest version is described in RFC 3261, which was written in
2002.
 This protocol describes how to set up Internet telephone calls,
video conferences, and other multimedia connections.
 The six methods defined by the core specification are listed in
Fig. 7-61.
Comparison of H.323 and SIP
 Summery of STREAMING AUDIO AND VIDEO
Digital Audio
Audio Compression
Digital Video
Video Compression
 The JPEG Standard
 The MPEG Standard

Streaming Stored Media

Streaming Live Media
IPTV (IP TeleVision)
Internet radio
Real-Time Conferencing
H.323
SIP—The Session Initiation Protocol
Comparison of H.323 and SIP
Content Delivery

By
Mrs Parimala G
Assistant Professor
 Outline
Content and Internet Traffic
Server Farms and Web Proxies
Content Delivery Networks
Peer-to-Peer Networks
The Internet used to be all about data communication.
The distributing content is different from that of
communication, it places different requirements on the
network.
Most of the web sites that provide content have
become tremendously popular. YouTube is a prime
example.
The techniques that are used for content distribution
have been developed over time. Many people began to
call the WWW the World Wide Wait.
There are different architectures to use the bandwidth
for distributing content.
CDN (Content Distribution Network)
P2P (Peer-to-Peer)
1. Content and Internet Traffic
Internet traffic is the flow of data within the entire
Internet, as transmission rates in bytes per certain
time units.
Web content refers to the textual or
visual content published on  website. 
Content means any creative element, for example,
text, applications, images, archived e-mail messages,
data, e-services, audio and video files, and so on. 
Web content is the key behind traffic generation to
websites.
 2. Server Farms and Web Proxies
Server Farms:
 A server farm is a group of computers acting as servers and housed together in a single
location.
 A Web server farm can be either (1) a Web site that has more than one server, or (2) an
Internet service provider (ISP) that provides Web hosting services using multiple servers.
Web Proxies:
Proxy server is an intermediary server between client and the internet.
Proxy servers offers the following basic functionalities:
Firewall and network data filtering
Network connection sharing
Data caching
 3. Content Delivery Networks
 A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers
which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
 Instead, of having clients look for a copy of the requested page in a nearby cache
 A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content
including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
 4. Peer-to-Peer Networks
P2P networks burst onto the scene starting in 1999.
In a P2P network, the "peers" are computer systems which
are connected to each other via the Internet. Files can be
shared directly between systems on the network without the
need of a central server.
The basic idea of a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file-sharing
network is that many computers come together and pool
their resources to form a content distribution system.
P2P networks are self-scaling.
Examples of P2P technology are:
BitTorrent
DHTs—Distributed Hash Tables
 DNS-Domain Name System
 E-mail
 The World Wide Web
 Streaming Audio and Video
 Content Delivery