MPEG-4 Systems: Elementary stream management

We describe the elementary stream management (ESM) facilities provided by MPEG-4 Systems. Within the extensive set of tools defined by MPEG-4, the ESM tools play a critical role in joining several building blocks together. ESM provides a dual to the scene description language (BIFS) in that it links the streaming resources of a presentation to the scene. We also describe the synchronization functionality as well as the system decoder model that defines the timing behavior and buffer resource management of MPEG-4 receivers. The paper concludes with considerations on data packaging in underlying delivery layer protocols and a description of the MPEG-4 content access procedure. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.