Towards Optimal Multirate Encoding for HTTP Adaptive Streaming

Published In: The International MultiMedia Modeling Conference, January 25-27, Prague, Czech Republic - PaperLink

Authors: Hadi Amirpour, Ekrem Çetinkaya (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Bitmovin), and Mohammad Ghanbari (University of Tehran, University of Essex)

Abstract: HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) enables high quality stream-ing of video contents. In HAS, videos are divided into short intervalscalled segments, and each segment is encoded at various quality/bitrates to adapt to the available bandwidth. Multiple encodings of the same content imposes high cost for video content providers. To reduce the time-complexity of encoding multiple representations, state-of-the-art methods typically encode the highest quality representation first and reuse the information gathered during its encoding to accelerate the encoding of the remaining representations. As encoding the highest quality representation requires the highest time-complexity compared to the lower quality representations, it would be a bottleneck in parallel encoding scenarios and the overall time-complexity will be limited to the time-complexity of the highest quality representation. In this paper and to address this problem, we consider all representations from the highest to the lowest quality representation as a potential, single reference to accelerate the encoding of the other, dependent representations. We formulate a set of encoding modes and assess their performance in terms of BD-Rate and time-complexity, using both VMAF and PSNR as objective metrics. Experimental results show that encoding the middle quality representation as a reference, can significantly reduce the maximum encoding complexity and hence it is an efficient way of encoding multiple representations in parallel. Based on this fact, a fast multirate encoding method is proposed which utilizes depth and prediction mode of a middle quality representation to accelerate the encoding of the dependent representations.

Keywords: HEVC, Video Encoding , Multirate Encoding , DASH

 @INPROCEEDINGS{MMM21,
    author={Amirpour, Hadi and {\c{C}}etinkaya, Ekrem and Timmerer, Christian and Ghanbari, Mohammad},
    booktitle={International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM)},
    title={Towards Optimal Multirate Encoding for {HTTP} Adaptive Streaming},
    year={2021},
    volume={},
    number={},
    pages={469--480},
    organization={Springer},
    doi={10.1007/978-3-030-67832-6_38}
 }