Real-time video applications, such as multi party video conferencing, involve the simultaneous transport of multiple and potentially multi-layered video sources to participating or interested parties. It is desirable to mix these multiple source videos into a single video stream at intermediary nodes in the network, e.g. at Multipoint Control Units (MCU). This has the advantage of reduced application and transport complexity on the client device while allowing single hardware decoder devices to consume the content. This paper proposes a solution, which uses the scalable extension of H.265/HEVC (SHVC), and that generates a single bitstream out of several sources by a low-complexity operation. In addition, the presented technique drastically reduces the peak bitrate at layout change events in comparison to state-of-the-art solutions.
['Yago Sanchez', 'Robert Skupin', 'Cornelius Hellge', 'Thomas Schierl']
Peak bitrate reduction for multi-party video conferencing using SHVC