Information technology - Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information - Part 1: Systems

This document specifies the system layer of the coding. It was developed principally to support the combination of the video and audio coding methods defined in Parts 2 and 3 of ISO/IEC 13818. The system layer supports six basic functions:

1) the synchronization of multiple compressed streams on decoding;

2) the interleaving of multiple compressed streams into a single stream;

3) the initialization of buffering for decoding start up;

4) continuous buffer management;

5) time identification;

6) multiplexing and signalling of various components in a system stream.

A Rec. ITU-T H.222.0 | ISO/IEC 13818-1 multiplexed bit stream is either a transport stream or a program stream. Both streams are constructed from PES packets and packets containing other necessary information. Both stream types support multiplexing of video and audio compressed streams from one program with a common time base. The transport stream additionally supports the multiplexing of video and audio compressed streams from multiple programs with independent time bases. For almost error-free environments the program stream is generally more appropriate, supporting software processing of program information. The tr