Improving the video streaming backend with on-the-fly format conversion and cloud storage

Abstract

Online advanced media streaming services using HTTP adaptive stream-
ing are increasingly popular. However in practice, the multi-protocol, multi-
format nature of adaptive streaming creates a lot of engineering eort and
costs for the operators, in the storage and preparation of the dierent
formats. In this work, we acknowledge these issues and we study a stream-
ing setup that can address these. Such streaming setup consist of a backend
cloud storage and a processing node that generates streaming presentations
for different devices on-the-fly. We analyse the streaming setup and its
performance by testing in cloud deployments. Through this evaluation, we
identify the performance limitations of the setup, imposed by the transfer
of data between the object storage and the processing node. We propose a
new backend storage caching scheme, based on rarely used existing feature
of dref in the specication of the MPEG-4 standard. Experimental results
show that the proposed scheme can improve the streaming performance,
such as reduced latency and increased outgoing traffic volume towards the
clients