The analysis of DASH manifest optimizations

Abstract

In live video streaming, the size of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) manifest grows as the number of periods increases and/or the overall time duration of DASH manifest increases. The bigger the manifest size in bytes is, the more computation for manifest generation, manifest storage and parsing and network traffic there will be on service side, the more data to be downloaded, manifest refresh latency, manifest parsing and storage in memory there will be on device side. In this paper, we analyze the techniques and algorithms available to optimize and reduce DASH manifest size with their pros and cons, and limitations of each technique in different scenarios, and propose further optimizations and the adoption of technique(s) in each video streaming scenario according to product requirements, operational cost, system complexity and the requirement of quality of video playback experiences.