Scalable video coding and transcoding

Scalable video coding (SVC) is standardized as H.264/AVC Annex G by the Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG. SVC extends the features of its base specification H.264/AVC by flexible scalability features in all directions (temporal, spatial and SNR) while maintaining high compression efficiency. This paper investigates scalable video coding, general transcoding techniques and SVC to H.264/AVC transcoding with emphasis on the conversion of SNR scalability layers in SVC to a single layer H.264/AVC stream.