The Moving Picture Experts Group

What does ‘Management of the MPEG-4 Receiving Terminal's Buffer’ mean?

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To predict how the decoder will behave when decoding the various elementary data streams that form an MPEG-4 session, Systems provide a Systems Decoder Model. This model helps to provide a well defined framework in which the receiver's behaviour can be unambiguously characterized. Use of this model enables the encoder to monitor the buffer resources that are used to decode the session and ensure that they are not exceeded. The required buffer resources are conveyed to the decoder at the beginning of a session, so that the decoder can decide whether it is capable to provide them. Buffer management is critical in broadcast applications, and as a general framework for defining and enabling synchronization. Real implementations will have to take steps to accommodate non ideal behaviour of the environment in which they operate; this typically involves additional buffering to filter out network jitter.