Downton abbey without the hiccups: buffer-based rate adaptation for HTTP video streaming

Abstract

Recent work has shown how hard it is to pick a video streaming rate. Video service providers use heuristics to estimate the network capacity leading to unnecessary rebuffering events and suboptimal video quality. This paper argues that we should do away with estimating network capacity, and instead directly observe and control the playback buffer. We present a class of rate selection algorithms that allow us to optimize the delivered video quality while provably never unnecessarily rebuffering. Our algorithms work with discrete video rates, video chunking and for both CBR and VBR video codecs.