An overview of scalable video streaming

As the number of networks, types of devices, and content representation formats increase, interoperability between different systems and different networks is becoming more important. Video streaming addresses the problem of transferring video data as a continuous Stream, typically there are two modes for transmission of stored video over the Internet, namely the download mode and the streaming mode (i.e., video streaming). In the download mode, a user downloads the entire video file and then plays back the video file. However, full file transfer in the download mode usually suffers long and perhaps unacceptable transfer time. Internet's transmission resources exhibit variability at multiple time-scales, and the available bandwidth fluctuates over a broad range because of the wide distribution of packet loss burst duration, changes in bottleneck capacity, and multiple time-scale queuingtime variation. This dynamic behavior of the Internet makes it difficult to provide perceptually good quality of streaming video In contrast, in the streaming mode, the video content need not be downloaded in full, but is being played out \\hile parts of the content are being received and decode

Slight-Delay Shaped Variable Bit Rate (SD-SVBR) Technique for Video Transmission

The aim of this thesis is to present a new shaped Variable Bit Rate (VBR) for video transmission, which plays a crucial role in delivering video traffic over the Internet. This is due to the surge of video media applications over the Internet and the video typically has the characteristic of a highly bursty traffic, which leads to the Internet bandwidth fluctuation. This new shaped algorithm, referred to as Slight Delay - Shaped Variable Bit Rate (SD-SVBR), is aimed at controlling the video rate for video application transmission. It is designed based on the Shaped VBR (SVBR) algorithm and was implemented in the Network Simulator 2 (ns-2). SVBR algorithm is devised for real-time video applications and it has several limitations and weaknesses due to its embedded estimation or prediction processes. SVBR faces several problems, such as the occurrence of unwanted sharp decrease in data rate, buffer overflow, the existence of a low data rate, and the generation of a cyclical negative fluctuation. The new algorithm is capable of producing a high data rate and at the same time a better quantization parameter (QP) stability video sequence. In addition, the data rate is shaped efficiently to prevent unwanted sharp increment or decrement, and to avoid buffer overflow. To achieve the aim, SD-SVBR has three strategies, which are processing the next Group of Picture (GoP) video sequence and obtaining the QP-to-data rate list, dimensioning the data rate to a higher utilization of the leaky-bucket, and implementing a QP smoothing method by carefully measuring the effects of following the previous QP value. However, this algorithm has to be combined with a network feedback algorithm to produce a better overall video rate control. A combination of several video clips, which consisted of a varied video rate, has been used for the purpose of evaluating SD-SVBR performance. The results showed that SD-SVBR gains an impressive overall Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) value. In addition, in almost all cases, it gains a high video rate but without buffer overflow, utilizes the buffer well, and interestingly, it is still able to obtain smoother QP fluctuation

A survey on buffer and rate adaptation optimization in TCP-based streaming media studies

Contrary to the popular conventional wisdom that the best transport protocol for the streaming media is UDP, many findings found that most of the transport protocols used nowadays are TCP. Two main reasons that UDP is not being used widely are it is not friendly to other flows and some organizations are blocking this protocol. In the meantime,TCP is naturally reliable and friendly to other flows. But with so many controls inbuilt in the protocol; such as congestion control, flow control, and others with the heavy acknowledgement mechanism, resulting delays and jitters.Thus it’s naturally not friendly to the streaming media.But with all the inherited weaknesses, we have seen explosive growth of streaming media in the Internet. With these contrasting premises, it is very interesting to study and investigate the streaming media via TCP transport protocol,specifically on buffer and rate adaptation optimization

OPPORTUNISTIC AND PLAYBACK-SENSITIVE SCHEDULING FOR VIDEO STREAMING

ABSTRACT Given the strict Quality of Service (QoS

Bookmarking and Seeking Tool for Online Videos

At 2014, 66% of internet traffic was related to video content [1]. This number and everyday experience shows that by improving handheld device capabilities, social networks and internet speed, the video content which has been seen and posted is taking up most internet traffic. As a result, this thesis focuses on improving the user experience with videos in two supplementary features: Bookmarking videos and enhanced seeking. There have been many cases, such as CCTV and medical cases, where making a video summary and video synopsis does not serve the purpose and the whole video must be available. However, the user is only interested in certain moments in the video. Usually in these cases either a video summary is generated along the main video, interesting moments in the video is kept as a note, or the user finds it manually by making seeking forward and backward. Video bookmarking, which means keeping the original video and makes a list of interesting moments in the video, so that the user can seek toward them by selecting them solves this issue. The bookmarks are standardized JSON objects in a JSON array that can be added, deleted or modified. In their simplest form, they have a relative start time, duration and a caption. Having bookmarks available in the cases mentioned above, user behavior can be predicted. The user is highly likely to request a seek for a bookmarked moment. By caching the video content, which has the bookmarked content, the user does not need to wait for buffering to see the video playing from the seek target. Currently, the user must wait for buffering. It has a major impact in cases such as CCTV and medical cases, where different cameras have recorded a scene from different angles and a seek action must seek all the video content, at the same time. In this thesis, an application has been developed as proof of concept which has met both requirements. It has been developed over an existing application, which is used for treatment of epilepsy by using automated seizure detection

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF CROSS-LAYER DESIGN WITH DISTRIBUTED AND SEQUENTIAL MAPPING SCHEME FOR VIDEO APPLICATION OVER IEEE 802.11E

The rapid development of wireless communication imposes several challenges to support QoS for real-time multimedia applications such as video stream applications. Researchers tackled these challenges from different points of view including the semantics of the video to achieve better QoS requirements. The main goal of this research is to design a UDP protocol to realize a distributed sequential mapping scheme (DSM) with a cross-layer design and evaluate its accuracy under different network conditions. In DSM, the perceived quality of a multi-layer video is addressed by mapping each video layer into channel resources represented as queues or access categories (ACs) existing in IEEE 802.11e MAC layer. This research work further investigates the efficiency of this scheme with actual implementation and thorough simulation experiments. The experiments reported the efficiency of this scheme with the presence of different composite traffic models covering most known traffic scenarios using Expected Reconstructed Video Layers (ERVL) and packet loss rate as accuracy measures. This research work also investigates the accuracy of calculating the ERVL compared to its value using actual readings of layers drop rate. The effect of changing the ACs queue size on the ERVL is studied. The use of this scheme shows zero-drop in the base layer in almost all scenarios where no ongoing traffic is presented except that the testing video sessions between nodes. In these experiments, the ERVL continuously reported high values for the number of expected reconstructed video layers. While these values dramatically vary when introducing ongoing different composite traffic models together with the testing video sessions between nodes. Finally, a 40% increase in the ACs queue size shows significant improvement on ERVL while an increase of the queue size beyond this value has very little significance on ERVL