R-D optimized media streaming enhanced with adaptive media playout
M. Kalman, Eckehard G. Steinbach, Bernd Girod · 2003
Streaming media systems buffer media data at the client to improve reconstruction quality at the cost of latency. Reconstruction quality may be further improved with rate-distortion optimized packet transmission. In this paper we show how the tradeoff between buffering latency and reconstruction quality can be improved with adaptive media playout (AMP) - the client-controlled manipulation of the playout speeds of media frames. We then show how to incorporate AMP into an existing framework for rate-distortion optimized packet transmission. The resulting receiver-driven scheme jointly optimizes packet transmissions and playout speeds with respect to rate, distortion and the subjective cost of playout speed variations. Results for a short media clip show a more than 2 dB improvement in mean PSNR for R-D optimized transmission combined with a moderate amount of AMP, over R-D optimized transmission alone.