Glossary

CC

Continuity Counter — counts the packets with the same PID in the TS stream. Allows the decoder to detect packet loss. It can not be an unambiguous sign of packet loss, because the counter size (4 bits) allows storing only 16 values (from 0 to 15) and the probability of losing the number of packets, multiples of 16, is high enough. At the same time, CC violations can occur in case of incorrect merging several TS streams.

CDN

Content Delivery Network — serves to optimize the unicast traffic delivery in the operator’s network or over the Internet.

Chunks

Content segments referenced by the playlist.

Demultiplexing

The process of obtaining elementary streams (audio, video and text) from media container.

DRM

Digital Rights Management — software or soft hardware restricting or preventing unauthorized access (copying, modification, viewing, etc.) to the content, or allowing to track such actions. DRM is a set of access control systems.

DTS

Decoding Time Stamp is used to indicate the order of frames decoding. Typically, frames in TS and MP4 containers are arranged in the order of DTS increasing.

DVR

Digital Video Recording — the possibility of digital TV-broadcasting, meaning recording and storing incoming streams (video, audio, text, metadata). Can be implemented both on the subscriber device (LocalDVR) and on the service provider equipment (Network DVR, nDVR). In particular, nDVR allows to implement such digital TV services as nPVR and Pause Live.

Elementary stream

The stream generated by the audio or video encoder. Contains only one kind of data — video, audio, subtitles, PCR or others.

Manifest

see Playlist. The term is used for the DASH protocol.

Media container

Media container (or container) — a format for storing video, audio and text data with synchronization marks between them. Several media streams of the same type can be stored in the media container, e.g. a movie (video stream) with several audio tracks (audio streams) and subtitles (text streams). The media container determines the size and structure of the attached data, but does not specify the encoding standard. Some of the most popular media containers today are MPEG-TS, MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI, 3gp, etc.

Multiplexing

Multiplexing (or muxing) — an operation or process of packaging elementary video and audio streams into a single media container with time synchronization.

nPVR

Network Personal Video Recorder — a digital TV service allowing the subscriber to record current broadcast and watch it later. The recording is performed on the service provider site. See also DVR.

Pause Live

The digital TV service allowing the subscriber to pause the current broadcast and resume playback later. The maximum broadcast suspension time may be limited by the service provider.

PID

Packet Identifier — the identifier of the packet in the TS stream. Packets containing fragments of the same elementary stream have the same PID by which they are recognized by the decoder.

Playlist

A file containing the data needed to play content on the subscriber device (including links to chunks). For more information, see: – https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8216#page-6 (for HLS), – https://www.iso.org/standard/65274.html (for DASH).

PMT

Program Map Table — the program structure table in the TS stream. PMT contains a list of all elementary streams of the program with their PIDs. SmartMEDIA supports TS streams with only one PMT (SPTS).

PTS

Presentation Time Stamp is used to specify the sequence of frames appearing on the screen. May differ from the decoding sequence in order to optimize the stream compression.

Remultiplexing

The process or operation of changing one media container to another one without elementary streams transcoding.

S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service is an online web service provided by Amazon Web Services. For more information, see https://aws.amazon.com/en/s3/details/.

Stream coding

Compression of audio or video stream using certain algorithms (codecs).

Stream decoding

Obtaining an uncompressed stream (a sequence of uncompressed frames for video or PCM stream for audio) from a compressed (encoded) stream.

TSTV

Time Shifted TV — a digital TV service allowing the subscriber to playback finished broadcasts.

Transcoding

The process or operation of changing the codec (compression algorithm) of the audio or video stream.

VoD

Video on Demand — a service of personal delivery of movies, series and TV program archives over the digital cable, satellite or terrestrial TV network.