A Personal Video Recording System Using H.264 and MPEG-2 Transport Stream

This article describes a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) system that uses H.264 for video coding and MPEG-2 transport stream as data format for simultaneous record and playback. Using H.264 provides two times longer recording time over MPEG-2 based on the same video quality. The 2004 amendment of the MPEG-2 system standard added support for the transport of none MPEG-2 AVC video data using MPEG-2 transport stream. This article discusses the overall architecture of the PVR and several key technical aspects of the implementation, including A/V capture, synchronization, storage and play-back. The implementation uses the Davinci Digital Video Software Development Kit (DVSDK).