P. Ni, A. Eichhorn, C. Griwodz, and P. Halvorsen (2009)
Fine-Grained Scalable Streaming from Coarse-Grained Videos
In: International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), ed. by Wei Tsang Ooi, Dongyan Xu, pp. 103-108, ACM, ACM
Scalable video is an attractive option for adapting the bandwidth consumption of streaming video to the available bandwidth. Fine-grained scalability can adapt most closely to the available bandwidth, but this comes at the cost of a high compression penalty. In the context of VoD streaming to mobile end systems, we have therefore explored whether a similar adaptation to the available bandwidth can be achieved by performing layer switching in coarse-grained scalable videos. In this approach, enhancement layers of a video stream are switched on and off to achieve any desired longer-term bandwidth. We performed user studies to evaluate the idea, and came to the far-from-obvious conclusion that layer switching is viable way for bit-rate savings and fine-grained bit-rate adaptation even for rather short times between layer switches.
