Implementation of Scalable Video Coding on LiveShift Application

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is an extension of the H.264/MPEG4 video compression standard. It enables encoding of a video stream in multiple subset bitstreams with different temporal, spatial, or quality resolutions. It makes possible to efficiently and scalably transmit a video stream to devices with different capabilities.

LiveShift is a peer-to-peer video streaming application developed by the CSG group at the University of Zurich. The application supports both live streaming and video-on-demand in an integrated manner. While video is transmitted through the peer-to-peer network in a live fashion, all peers participate in a distributed storage. This adds the ability to replay time-shifted streams from other peers in a distributed and scalable manner.

The aim of this thesis is to integrate an SVC codec in LiveShift. An SVC implementation is available, while LiveShift already has network-level support for different subset bitstreams. The challenge lies on seamlessly integrating the codec, which is written in C++, to the application, which is written in Java.