Method of and apparatus for the transmission of high and low priority

Abstract

Apparatus and method of transmitting a video bitstream from a transmitter over a facility to a receiver, the video bitstream including a plurality of high priority segments and associated low priority segments, is disclosed. The transmitter first transmits high priority information, representative of the high priority segments, of the video bitstream over the facility using a first packet delivery mechanism having a first probability of success and subsequently transmits a low priority partition, including the low priority segments, of the video bitstream over the facility using a second packet deliver mechanism having a second probability of success which is substantially lower than that of the first delivery mechanism. At the receiver, the high priority partition is received and used to generate the high priority segments. When each low priority segment of the low priority partition is received, the associated high priority segment is interleaved in real time with the received low priority segment to create an interleaved video bitstream. The high priority information may be sent as a high priority partition (including the high priority segments), sent as a high priority format (used by the receiver to generate high priority segments), or sent as a high priority identifier (used to identify previously stored high priority segments at the receiver).