Minimum delay content adaptive video streaming over variable bitrate channels with a novel stream switching solution

We present a new channel adaptive stream switching solution for variable bitrate video transmission, where the receiver buffer status is used for making switching decisions and instantaneous transmission rate is determined by means of explicit channel feedback or TCP friendly rate control. Receiver buffer status is used in selecting from a set of pre-encoded bitstreams avoiding buffer underflows and overflows. A pre-roll delay to buffer data at the receiving side is necessary in order to compensate for variations in the channel throughput and the encoding bitrate. For each stream, content dependent video coding parameters are chosen by means of dynamic programming such that the maximum overall video quality and minimum pre-roll delay are achieved for a finite number of transmission rates. Experimental results show that buffer violations are successfully avoided using the proposed stream switching framework as opposed to a regular non-adaptive streaming case.