Video BenchLab demo: an open platform for video realistic streaming benchmarking

Abstract

In this demonstration, we present an open, flexible and realistic benchmarking platform named Video BenchLab to measure the performance of streaming media workloads. While Video BenchLab can be used with any existing media server, we provide a set of tools for researchers to experiment with their own platform and protocols. The components include a MediaDrop video server, a suite of tools to bulk insert videos and generate streaming media workloads, a dataset of freely available video and a client runtime to replay videos in the native video players of real Web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Various metrics are collected to capture the quality of video playback and identify issues that can happen during video replay. Finally, we provide a Dashboard to manage experiments, collect results and perform analytics to compare performance between experiments. The demonstration showcases all the BenchLab video components including a MediaDrop server accessed by real web browsers running locally and in the cloud. We demo the whole experiment lifecycle from creation to deployment as well as result collection and analysis.