The IEEE-1394 high speed serial bus

The IEEE-1394 is a new standard for a digital high-speed serial interconnect bus. It allows real-time data to be mixed with other data transfers at transmission rates of 100, 200 and 400 Mbit/s. This makes it flexible enough for applications in multimedia environments where multiple video and audio streams have to be transported between several devices simultaneously. One of the most important applications in the consumer electronics world is MPEG-2 data transport between set-top box and digital video recorder. The extremely time-critical nature of MPEG-2 requires some additional processing before it can be sent on an IEEE-1394 bus. This has led to the standardization of the audio/video layer described in this article.