Seamless video switching system for service compatible 3DTV broadcasting

Broadcasting services such as multi/single channel HDTV and 3DTV/2DTV use a multi-channel encoder that changes the bitrate and composition of the video service depending on the time. However, this type of multichannel encoder could cause a longer latency owing to the variable bitrate and relatively bigger size of the buffers, which results in the same delay as in 3DTV even for a conventional DTV service. On the other hand, systems built based on separate encoders, each of which is optimized for the target service, might not have such latency problems. Nevertheless, there might be a distortion problem in the image and sound at the time of a switchover between two encoders with different output bitrates and group of picture structures. This paper proposes a system that can realize a seamless video service conversion using two different video encoders optimized for each video service. An overall functional description of the video service change control server, which is a main control block for the proposed system, is also provided. The experiment results confirm the seamless switchover and reduced broadcasting latency of DTV services compared with a broadcasting system composed of a multi-channel encoder system.