7. De-Packetization Process

7. De-Packetization Process

The de-packetization process is implementation dependent. Therefore, the following description should be seen as an example of a suitable implementation. Other schemes may also be used as long as the output for the same input is the same as the process described below. The same output means that the resulting NAL units and their order are identical. Optimizations relative to the described algorithms are likely possible. Section 7.1 presents the de-packetization process for the single NAL unit and non-interleaved packetization modes, whereas Section 7.2 describes the process for the interleaved mode. Section 7.3 includes additional de-packetization guidelines for intelligent receivers.

All normal RTP mechanisms related to buffer management apply. In particular, duplicated or outdated RTP packets (as indicated by the RTP sequence number and the RTP timestamp) are removed. To determine the exact time for decoding, factors such as a possible intentional delay to allow for proper inter-stream synchronization must be factored in.