RSVP: Ridiculously Scalable Video Playback on Clustered Tiled Displays

Abstract

This paper introduces a distributed approach for playback of video content at resolutions of 4K (digital cinema) and well beyond. This approach is designed for scalable, high-resolution, multi-tile display environments, which are controlled by a cluster of machines, with each node driving one or multiple displays. A preparatory tiling pass separates the original video into a user definable n-by-m array of equally sized video tiles, each of which is individually compressed. By only reading and rendering the video tiles that correspond to a given node's viewpoint, the computation power required for video playback can be distributed over multiple machines, resulting in a highly scalable video playback system. This approach exploits the computational parallelism of the display cluster while only using minimal network resources in order to maintain software-level synchronization of the video playback. While network constraints limit the maximum resolution of other high-resolution video playback approaches, this algorithm is able to scale to video at resolutions of tens of millions of pixels and beyond. Furthermore the system allows for flexible control of the video characteristics, allowing content to be interactively reorganized while maintaining smooth playback. This approach scales well for concurrent playback of multiple videos and does not require any specialized video decoding hardware to achieve ultra-high resolution video playback.