Changing network conditions pose severe problems to video streaming in the Internet. HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is a technology employed by numerous video services that relieves these issues by adapting the video to the current network conditions. It enables service providers to improve resource utilization and Quality of Experience (QoE) by incorporating information from different layers in order to deliver and adapt a video in its best possible quality. Thereby, it allows taking into account end user device capabilities, available video quality levels, current network conditions, and current server load. For end users, the major benefits of HAS compared to classical HTTP video streaming are reduced interruptions of the video playback and higher bandwidth utilization, which both generally result in a higher QoE. Adaptation is possible by changing the frame rate, resolution, or quantization of the video, which can be done with various adaptation strategies and related client- and server-side actions. The technical development of HAS, existing open standardized solutions, but also proprietary solutions are reviewed in this paper as fundamental to derive the QoE influence factors that emerge as a result of adaptation. The main contribution is a comprehensive survey of QoE related works from human computer interaction and networking domains, which are structured according to the QoE impact of video adaptation. To be more precise, subjective studies that cover QoE aspects of adaptation dimensions and strategies are revisited. As a result, QoE influence factors of HAS and corresponding QoE models are identified, but also open issues and conflicting results are discussed. Furthermore, technical influence factors, which are often ignored in the context of HAS, affect perceptual QoE influence factors and are consequently analyzed. This survey gives the reader an overview of the current state of the art and recent developments. At the same time, it targets networking researchers who develop new solutions for HTTP video streaming or assess video streaming from a user centric point of view. Therefore, this paper is a major step toward truly improving HAS.

A Survey on Quality of Experience of HTTP Adaptive Streaming

The delivery of audio-visual content over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) got lot of attention in recent years and with dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) a standard is now available. Many papers cover this topic and present their research results, but unfortunately all of them use their own private dataset which -- in most cases -- is not publicly available. Hence, it is difficult to compare, e.g., adaptation algorithms in an objective way due to the lack of a common dataset which shall be used as basis for such experiments. In this paper, we present our DASH dataset including our DASHEncoder, an open source DASH content generation tool. We also provide basic evaluations of the different segment lengths, the influence of HTTP server settings, and, in this context, we show some of the advantages as well as problems of shorter segment lengths.

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Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP dataset

Methods and apparatuses provide real-time or near real-time streaming of content, specified in one or more playlists, using transfer protocols such as an HTTP compliant protocol. In one embodiment, a method can execute a user application on a client device to present media files and to control presentation of the media files. The method can further run a media serving process on the client device to retrieve a playlist specifying the media files and a media source at which the media files are available, to retrieve the media files from the media source, and to decode the media files retrieved. The media serving process can call the user application to process a custom URL in order to obtain an object referred to by the custom URL.

Real-time or near real-time streaming

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is widely deployed on the Internet for live and on-demand video streaming services. Video adaptation algorithms in existing DASH systems are either too sluggish to respond to congestion level shifts or too sensitive to short-term network bandwidth variations. Both degrade user video experience. In this paper, we formally study the responsiveness and smoothness trade-off in DASH through analysis and experiments. We show that client-side buffered video time is a good feedback signal to guide video adaptation. We then propose novel video rate control algorithms that balance the needs for video rate smoothness and high bandwidth utilization. We show that a small video rate margin can lead to much improved smoothness in video rate and buffer size. The proposed DASH designs are also extended to work with multiple CDN servers. We develop a fully-functional DASH system and evaluate its performance through extensive experiments on a network testbed and the Internet. We demonstrate that our DASH designs are highly efficient and robust in realistic network environment.

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Towards agile and smooth video adaptation in dynamic HTTP streaming

In this dataset paper, we present and make available real-world measurements of the throughput that was achieved at the application layer when adaptive HTTP streaming was performed over 3G networks using mobile devices. For the streaming sessions, we used popular commute routes in and around Oslo (Norway) traveling with different types of public transportation (metro, tram, train, bus and ferry). We also have a few logs using a car. Each log provides a times-tamp, GPS coordinates and the measured number of bytes downloaded for approximately every second of the route. The dataset can be used in several ways, but the most obvious application is to emulate the same network bandwidth behavior (on specific geographical positions) for repeated experiments.

Commute path bandwidth traces from 3G networks: analysis and applications

MPEGs' Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) is an emerging standard designed for media delivery over the top of existing infrastructures and able to handle varying bandwidth conditions during a streaming session. This requirement is very important, specifically within mobile environments and, thus, DASH could potentially become a major driver for mobile multimedia streaming. Hence, this paper provides a detailed evaluation of our implementation of MPEG DASH compared to the most popular propriety systems, i.e., Microsoft Smooth Steaming, Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming, and Apple HTTP Live Streaming. In particular, these systems will be evaluated under restricted conditions which are due to vehicular mobility. In anticipation of the results, our prototype implementation of MPEG-DASH can very well compete with state-of-the-art solutions and, thus, can be regarded as a mature standard ready for industry adaption.

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An evaluation of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP in vehicular environments

This paper describes the implementation of a VLC media player plugin enabling Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). DASH is an emerging ISO/IEC MPEG and 3GPP standard for HTTP streaming. It aims to standardize formats enabling segmented progressive download by exploiting existing Internet infrastructure as such. Our implementation of these formats as described in this paper is based on the well-known VLC. Hence, it is fully integrated into the VLC structure and has been also submitted to the VLC development team for consideration in future releases of VLC. Therefore, it is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The plugin provides a very flexible structure that could be easily extended with respect to different adaptation logics or profiles of the DASH standard. As a consequence, the plugin enables the integration of a variety of adaptation logics and comparison thereof, making it attractive for the research community.

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A VLC media player plugin enabling dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

In this paper, we present our implementation and evaluation of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over Content centric networking (DASC) which implements MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) utilizing a Content Centric Networking (CCN) naming scheme to identify content segments in a CCN network. In particular, video segments formatted according to MPEG-DASH are available in different quality levels but instead of HTTP, CCN is used for referencing and delivery. Based on the conditions of the network, the DASC client issues interests for segments achieving the best throughput. Due to segment caching within the network, subsequent requests for the same content can be served quicker. As a result, the quality of the video a user receives progressively improves, effectively overcoming bottlenecks in the network. We present two sets of experiments to evaluate the performance of DASC showing that throughput indeed improves. However, the generated overhead is relatively large and the adaptation strategy used for DASH that assumes an end-to-end connection could be revised for the hop-by-hop architecture of CCN.

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Dynamic adaptive streaming over CCN: A caching and overhead analysis

In this paper, we present a multimedia test-bed enabling session mobility in the context of the emerging ISO/IEC MPEG standard, Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). In general, session mobility is defined as the transfer of a running streaming session from one device to another device where it may need to be consumed in an adaptive way. The two main challenges are: (1) taking into account the new context of the device (e.g., capabilities) to which the session is transferred and (2) performing the actual transfer in a seamless and interoperable way. Our system addresses both challenges supported by a prototype implementation integrated into VLC. In anticipation of the results we can conclude that interoperability is achieved adopting existing standards while the performance of the system does not depend on these standards. That is, the modules responsible for the performance are usually not defined within such standards and left out for competition. However, our system is designed in an extensible way and is able to accommodate this fact.

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Christopher Müller

Papers

Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP dataset

An evaluation of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP in vehicular environments

A VLC media player plugin enabling dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

Dynamic adaptive streaming over CCN: A caching and overhead analysis

A test-bed for the dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP featuring session mobility