Adaptation of AVC (H.264) for cable

MPEG-2 video standard, created in 1994, has been popular and adopted in the broadcast industry worldwide. Advanced Video Coding (AVC) [1] standard was created in 2003, utilizing the advances in compression, hardware and software technologies and to support application convergence among major consumer video appliances/devices. AVC provides 2X better compression efficiency than MPEG-2 and is created as a toolbox with large set of tools. AVC is highly flexible and can be adapted to any consumer video application by using a subset of these tools. AVC syntax is also created to adapt to many transport systems such as MPEG-2 TS and RTP/IP. To ensure interoperability among the AVC broadcast receivers and to meet the needs of the cable broadcast applications such as fast channel change, PVR trick mode and local commercial insertion, ANSI/SCTE 128 standard [2] was created. This paper outlines the features and functions required for broadcast applications that are supported by the SCTE 128 specification.