Elastic Frame Protocol: An Open-Source Alternative to MPEG-2 TS

This paper looks at the use of framing and multiplexing protocols in broadcast media. In it, we identify several inefficiencies that have arisen from using MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) in some areas of modern IP-based media transport and discuss how the new open-source Elastic Frame Protocol (EFP) attempts to avoid these issues. Areas discussed include protocol overhead, timeline and time stamps, error detection and recovery, (de)multiplexing, complex transport architectures and flexibility. MPEG-2 TS has the advantage of being almost universally supported in broadcast media transport. But we found that EFP provided significantly lower overhead, 64-bit timestamps and much improved possibilities to detect packet loss and correct packets that are delivered out of order.

Mikael Wånggren | Agile Content S.A. | Stockholm, Sweden