A Novel Adaptation Method for HTTP Streaming of VBR Videos over Mobile Networks

Abstract

Recently, HTTP streaming has become very popular for delivering videos over the Internet. For adaptivity, a provider should generate multiple versions of a video as well as the related metadata. Various adaptation methods have been proposed to support a streaming client in coping with strong bandwidth variations. However, most of existing methods target at constant bitrate (CBR) videos only. In this paper, we present a new method for quality adaptation in on-demand streaming of variable bitrate (VBR) videos. To cope with strong variations of VBR bitrate, we use a local average bitrate as the representative bitrate of a version. A buffer-based algorithm is then proposed to conservatively adapt video quality. Through experiments in the mobile streaming context, we show that our method can provide quality stability as well as buffer stability even under very strong variations of bandwidth and video bitrates.