A Heuristic Buffer Management Scheme on Android to Enhance Video Quality on Digital Handheld Devices

Abstract

Most research efforts have concentrated on advancement in video compression techniques resulting in DivX/Xvid codecs for better performance on handheld devices. Initial investigations reveal that these techniques are actually taking less time compared to entire execution time in a typical media playback system. However, it enlists that the buffer management methods employed in multimedia framework can significantly impact the overall end-to-end performance on these resource constrained devices. Motivated by these observations, we present a heuristic buffer management scheme to improve end-to-end performance for Android based devices. The outline of the paper is as follows: Firstly, we discuss few related works to investigate existing buffer management methods used within Packet Video Multimedia framework (PVMF) of Android. Secondly, we describe how buffering schemes used between processors in hardware platform can further contribute to the performance bottleneck. Consequently, a heuristic buffer management scheme is proposed to ensure uniform buffer allocation among PVMF components and between processor-coprocessor of the hardware platform. We point out the need for such a mechanism to synchronize media processing and media controlling elements to alleviate video quality in a constant time factor. To validate our approach, an experiment was performed using the said buffer management technique to playback Xvid content on Zoom2 hardware platform based on Android. We summarize the performance characteristics for the trial experiments conducted. Experimental results lead us to conclude the technique is effective at improving overall system performance significantly. We extend to benchmark the performance achieved to further characterize this method. Finally, we also evaluate the tradeoff between memory and performance using our method with combinations of measurements using our experimental setup.