Professional Video Over IP - Packet Loss

Packet Loss

Since even well-engineered IP networks tend to have a small residual packet loss rate caused by low-probability statistical congestion events and amplification of bit errors in the underlying hardware, most professional solutions use some kind of forward error correction to ensure that the encoded video stream can be reconstructed even if a few packets are lost. This is typically applied at the packet level, since the encapsulated video bitstream is typically only designed to tolerate low levels of bit or burst errors, rather than the loss of whole packets. Resending packets is not an option because of the sequential nature of the underlying video signal. For live video, a resent packet would arrive well after the arrival of the next frame of video.