RTP Sender and Receiver for Multicast in MST Mode for SVC

Intro

Command line tools for sending and receiving Scalable Video Coding (SVC) streams via RTP over IP multicast in Multi-Session Transmission (MST) mode.

The receiver is implemented in C (for speed), the sender is implemented as a Python script.

Installation

To compile the receiver, simple call:

make

Application

First, start the receiver:

./rtp_mst   224.1.1.1 5110   224.1.1.2 5120   224.1.1.3 5130   224.1.1.4 5140   output_file.264

Then, start the sender:

python rtp_mst_sender.py   input_file.264   224.1.1.1 5110   224.1.1.2 5120   224.1.1.3 5130   224.1.1.4 5140

Notes

• Transport of SVC over RTP complies to RFC 6184 (AVC over RTP) and RFC 6190 (SVC over RTP).
• The sender was tested with Python 2.7 and 3.2.3.
• The client was implemented for Linux. Windows is not yet supported.
• Sender and receiver were tested with SVC bitstreams from the bSoft encoder (http://www.bsoft.net/)
• The receiver supports Single NALU Unit packets and Fragmentation Units.
• For cross-session decoding order, the receiver relies on NI-C/NI-TC.
• The receiver waits until it receives a NALU of type 7 (Sequence parameter set) or type 5 (Coded slice of an IDR picture) before starting to write to the output file.
• The receiver has a dejitter buffer (currently 16 packets).
• The receiver can cope with in-network adaptation, i.e., multicast groups may stop/restart delivering data at any given time.
• When a packet was lost, the receiver writes all packets of the NALU up to the lost packet. That is, the output may contain incomplete NALUs.
• The receiver writes any received NALU (respecting decoding order), missing dependencies between SVC layers must be handled by the SVC decoder's error resilience.

• The receiver stops when either end-of-sequence/end-of-stream NALUs (type 10 or 11) are received or when no data at all is received for a given time (2 seconds).

• The sender includes ICT-ALICANTE Content-Aware Transport Information (CATI) in an RTP header extension (compliant to RFC 3550).

• The client can detect (but not use) the RTP header extension for CATI.

Credits

Author: Michael Grafl <michael(dot)grafl(at)itec(dot)aau(dot)at>, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Contributions: Markus Waltl <markus(dot)waltl(at)itec(dot)aau(dot)at>, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

This work was supported in part by the EC in the context of the ALICANTE project (FP7-ICT-248652). http://www.ict-alicante.eu/

License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2013 Michael Grafl

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.