Video transcoding for mobile digital television

Mobile digital television is one of the new services introduced recently by telecommunications operators. Due to the possibilities of personalization and interaction provided, together with the increasing demand for this type of portable services, it will undoubtedly be a successful technology in the near future. Multimedia content is generally encoded by reducing the storage capacity necessary and bandwidth consumption in order to be transmitted. In order to adapt to the different characteristics of the networks and the varying capabilities of the devices, scalable video coding schemes have been proposed that provide temporal, spatial, and quality scalability, or a combination of these. Most of the existing video content is compressed using H.264/AVC, which is a single-layer codec, so these contents cannot benefit from the scalability tools due to the lack of intrinsic scalability provided in the bitstream at encoding time. This paper proposes a technique to convert from the single-layer H.264/AVC bitstream to a scalable bitstream with temporal scalability. Applying this approach, a reduction of 60% in coding complexity is achieved while maintaining the coding efficiency.