By Mukta Kar, Majid Chelehmal, Rich Prodan Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.
An important objective of the MPEG standardization effort is to define a set of video and audio compression techniques and to increase interoperability among various digital audio/ video devices made by different manufacturers. To further this effort, the MPEG committee has defined a set of normative compliance requirements in a part of the MPEG standard which sets forth procedures and bitstreams to test MPEG-2 related products.
Many manufacturers, particularly small ones, do not have enough resources to test their product thoroughly for compliance. To help cable operators and the cable industry, Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) has set up a conformance testing laboratory. These efforts should minimize concern about incompatibility among MPEG products and should assist in the development of a multi-vendor base of interoperable equipment.
This paper reviews some of the background of the MPEG-2 Standard and its compliance requirements. Discussion about non-realtime and realtime conformance testing is also included. The current conformance testing capabilities at CableLabs and the results of bitstream analysis from several manufactures realtime encoding system are discussed.