HTML5 MSE Playback of MPEG 360 VR Tiled Streaming
This enables browser-based VR video playback, addressing a gap for developers and users in immersive media, though it is incremental as it builds on existing standards.
The paper tackled the lack of web browser-based implementations for MPEG-OMAF-compatible VR video streaming by developing a JavaScript player that supports HEVC-based viewport-dependent tile-based streaming, successfully demonstrating it in Safari using HTML5 Media Source Extensions and WebGL APIs.
Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree video streaming have gained significant attention in recent years. First standards have been published in order to avoid market fragmentation. For instance, 3GPP released its first VR specification to enable 360-degree video streaming over 5G networks which relies on several technologies specified in ISO/IEC 23090-2, also known as MPEG-OMAF. While some implementations of OMAF-compatible players have already been demonstrated at several trade shows, so far, no web browser-based implementations have been presented. In this demo paper we describe a browser-based JavaScript player implementation of the most advanced media profile of OMAF: HEVC-based viewport-dependent OMAF video profile, also known as tile-based streaming, with multi-resolution HEVC tiles. We also describe the applied workarounds for the implementation challenges we encountered with state-of-the-art HTML5 browsers. The presented implementation was tested in the Safari browser with support of HEVC video through the HTML5 Media Source Extensions API. In addition, the WebGL API was used for rendering, using region-wise packing metadata as defined in OMAF.