On combining temporal scaling and quality scaling for streaming MPEG

ABSTRACT

Temporal Scaling and Quality Scaling are both widely-used techniques to reduce the bitrate of streaming video. However, combinations and comparisons of Temporal and Quality Scaling have not been systematically studied. This research extends previous work to provide a model for combining Temporal and Quality Scaling, and uses an optimization algorithm to provide a systematic analysis of their combination over a range of network conditions and video content. Analytic experiments show: 1) Quality Scaling typically performs better than Temporal Scaling, with performance differences correlated with the motion characteristics of the video. In fact, when the network capacity is moderate and the loss rate is low, Quality Scaling performs nearly as well as the optimal combination of Quality and Temporal Scaling; 2) when the network capacity is low and the packet loss rate is high, Quality Scaling alone is ineffective, but a combination of Quality and Temporal Scaling can provide reasonable video quality; 3) adjusting the amount of Forward Error Correction (FEC) provides significantly better performance than video streaming without FEC or video streaming with a fixed amount of FEC.

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