RATS: Adaptive 360-degree live streaming

Abstract

Recent approaches to tiled 360°adaptive bitrate video streaming present significant bandwidth savings at little risk of stalling when only parts of the video, e.g., the current and predicted viewport, are transferred in high quality while the rest of the 360°video tiles are transferred in a lower quality. While this is currently feasible for video on demand scenarios, it poses a difficult problem for 360°live streaming as naive methods produce a considerable overhead owing to the lack of tiling support in existing hardware encoders. In this demo, we show Real-time Adaptive Three-sixty Streaming, or RATS, where we utilize GPU-based HEVC encoding to tile, encode, and stitch 360°video at different qualities in real-time. We show measurement results for the encoding speed, amont of output data, and output quality for different tiling configurations. While we observe an increase in both encoding time and output file size with the number of desired tile columns, we also see that real-time encoding is ensured for all considered tiling configurations.