A Novel Adaptation Method for HTTP Streaming of VBR Videos over Mobile Networks
This addresses the challenge of streaming VBR videos over mobile networks, which is an incremental improvement over existing methods that primarily target constant bitrate videos.
The paper tackles the problem of adapting HTTP streaming for variable bitrate (VBR) videos over mobile networks by proposing a method using local average bitrate and a buffer-based algorithm, resulting in improved quality and buffer stability under strong bandwidth and bitrate variations.
Recently, HTTP streaming has become very popular for delivering video over the Internet. For adaptivity, a provider should generate multiple versions of a video as well as the related metadata. Various adaptation methods have been proposed to support a streaming client in coping with strong bandwidth variations. However, most of existing methods target at constant bitrate (CBR) videos only. In this paper, we present a new method for quality adaptation in on-demand streaming of variable bitrate (VBR) videos. To cope with strong variations of VBR bitrate, we use a local average bitrate as the representative bitrate of a version. A buffer-based algorithm is then proposed to conservatively adapt video quality. Through experiments, we show that our method can provide quality stability as well as buffer stability even under very strong variations of bandwidth and video bitrates.