DCC’20: Fast Multi-Rate Encoding for Adaptive HTTP Streaming

Fast Multi-Rate Encoding for Adaptive HTTP Streaming

Data Compression Conference 2020, March 24 – 27, Cliff Lodge, Snowbird, UT

[PDF] (coming soon)

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: Adaptive HTTP streaming is the preferred method to deliver multimedia content on the internet. It provides multiple representations of the same content in different qualities (i.e., bit-rates and resolutions) and allows the client to request segments from the available representations in a dynamic, adaptive way depending on its context. The growing number of representations in adaptive HTTP streaming makes encoding of one video segment at different representations a challenging task in terms of encoding time-complexity. In this paper, information of both the highest and lowest quality representations are used to limit Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO) for each Coding Unit Tree (CTU) in High Efficiency Video Coding. Our proposed method first encodes the highest quality representation and consequently uses it to encode the lowest quality representation. In particular, the block structure and the selected reference frame of both the highest and lowest quality representations are then used to predict and shorten the RDO process of each CTU for intermediate quality representations. Our proposed method introduces a delay of two CTUs thanks to employing parallel processing techniques. Experimental results show a significant reduction in time-complexity over the reference software (38%) and state-of-the-art (10%) is achieved while quality degradation is negligible.

Keywords:  HTTP adaptive streaming, Multi-rate encoding, HEVC, Fast block partitioning