Adaptive Streaming has a good potential to replace widely used progressive download. Adaptive streaming can dynamically adjust the video bit-rate to the varying available bandwidth and prevent prefetching too much future video data when the extra bandwidth is available but the data are eventually left unused. For adaptive streaming, video servers need to maintain multiple copies of the same video with different bit-rates for different clients and clients with different kinds of connectivity, which requires additional server storage and reduces cache hit ratio. Recently, Scalable Video Coding (H.264/SVC) is considered to be able to save server storage and increase hit ratio using the existing web cache infrastructure (click here to see how much storage can be saved). However, a rate adaptation algorithm still needs to be carefully designed for streaming scalable video.

In this project, we design and implement a framework for Adaptive Scalable Video (H.264/SVC) Streaming over HTTP.

1) An extractor is designed and implemented to analyze H.264/SVC bitstream Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) units and split the encoded bitstream into layer segments.

2) A rate adaptation algorithm is designed and implemented to adapt the video bitrate to the varying bandwidth and heterogeneous client requirements.

3) A simple video player is implemented using Open SVC decoder(GPL2) and SDL to demonstrate the potential of commercialization of this project.

More detailed framework and implementation information can be found in framework page. Screenshot and demos can be found in this page.

Project member: Siyuan Xiang. siyxiang at ece dot uvic dot ca

project supervisor: Dr. Lin Cai and Dr. Jianping Pan

This project has won the 3rd-place prize in the 2011 BCNET Digital Media Challenge student competition, Vancouver, May, 2011.

publication:

[1] S. Xiang, L. Cai and J. Pan. "Dynamic Rate Adaptation for Adaptive Video Streaming in Wireless Networks." Submitted to Multimedia, IEEE Trans. on, 2012

[2] S. Xiang, L. Cai and J. Pan. “Adaptive Scalable Video Streaming in Wireless Networks.” ACM MMSys 2012, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.