Scaling Bandwidth and Complexity of Hybrid MC/DCT Video Codecs

Multi-user video conferencing has high and diverse bandwidth and performance requirements. We analyse the scaling behaviour of a standard hybrid video codec by varying the quantization degree, the temporal and spatial resolution. We define a framework to select the set of coding parameters when the bandwidth and complexity constraints are known. Additionally, the efficiency of simulcast and layered solutions to overcome large bandwidth and/or computational resource variations among the participants are compared. In this context, the temporal resolution turns out to be the best-suited parameter to provide multiple resolutions through independent streams dealing with the network unreliability.