Providing Smoother Quality Layered Video Stream
Srihari Nelakuditi, Raja R. Harinath, Ewa Kuśmierek, Zhi-Li Zhang · 2000
In recent years, one of the most popular Internet applications is web-based audio and video playback, where stored video is streamed from the server to a client on-demand. Rigid playback deadlines coupled with constraints on resources such as network bandwidth and client buffer make video delivery a challenging task. These resources could be limited in such a way that it may not be possible to deliver full-quality video. In such a situation, it is desirable to minimize the degradation in the video quality while operating within the resource constraints. Layered encoding is proposed to provide finer control on video quality: the video signal is split into layers and a subset of these layers is chosen such that the resource constraints are met. However it is not a trivial task to select layers such that better but consistent quality playback is ensured when the network conditions are constantly varying. In our work, we address this layer selection problem.