System Clock Recovery and Time Stamping

In many digital video applications, it is important for the signals to be stored, transmitted, or processed in a synchronized manner. This requires that the signals be time-aligned. For example, it is important that the video decoder clock locks to the video encoder (or transcoder) clock, so that the video signals can be decoded and displayed in the almost exact time instants. The action of controlling timing in this way is called video (clock) synchronization. In this chapter we will discuss video synchronization techniques, such as system clock recovery and time stamping for decoding and presentation.