Video: Adaptive Bitrate Algorithms: How They Work

Streaming on the net relies on delivering video at a bandwidth you can handle. Called ‘Adaptive Bitrate’ or ABR, it’s hardly possible to think of streaming without it. While the idea might seem simple initially – just send several versions of your video – it quickly gets nuanced.

Streaming experts Streamroot take us through how ABR works at Streaming Media East from 2016. While the talk is a few years old, the facts are still the same so this remains a useful talk which not only introduces the topic but goes into detail on how to implement ABR.

The most common streaming format is HLS which relies on the player downloading the video in sections – small files – each representing around 3 to 10 seconds of video. For HLS and similar technologies, the idea is simply to allow the player, when it’s time to download the next part of the video, to choose from a selection of files each with the same video content but each at a different bitrate.

Allowing a player to choose which chunk it downloads means it can adapt to changing network conditions but does imply that each file has contain exactly the same frames of video else there would be a jump when the next file is played. So we have met our first complication. Furthermore, each encoded stream needs to be segmented in the same way and in MPEG, where you can only cut files on I-frame boundaries, it means the encoders need to synchronise their GOP structure giving us our second complication.

These difficulties, many more and Streamroot’s solutions are presented by Erica Beavers and Nikolay Rodionov including experiments and proofs of concept they have carried out to demonstrate the efficacy.

Watch now!

Speakers

Erica Beavers Erica Beavers
Head of Marketing & Partnerships,
Streamroot
Nikolay Rodionov Nikolay Rodionov
Co-Founder, CPO
Streamroot

Webinar: Video Delivery Trends


Date: Thursday February 28th 2019, 10am PT / 1PM ET / 18:00 GMT

Streaming continues to grow, in amount streamed, in people consuming it and in importance within this and other industries. One things which has always been an enabler yet made streaming harder to deploy is its rapid evolution. Whilst this has been a boon for smaller, nimbler companies – both content producers and service providers – the streaming has now arrived at most companies in one way or another and this breadth of use-cases has kept streaming tech moving forward and showing no signs of abatement.

Some aspects are changing. For instance we are seeing the first patent-free MPEG standard proposals (EVC, which has basic patent-free functionality and a better performing patent-controlled profile) on the heels of AV1. We’re seeing low-latency efforts such as CMAF taking hold as an alternative to WebRTC. With CMAF being much closer to the ever popular HLS, this may well beat out WebRTC in deployments at the cost of a slightly higher, but much improved latency.

To bring all of this in to focus for 2019, Jason Thibeault from the Streaming Video Alliance is bringing together a panel of experts to look at the coming trends and to give us an idea of what to look out for, and how to make sense, of 2019’s year of video delivery.

Register now!

Speakers

Guillaume Bichot Guillaume Bichot
Head of Exploration,
Broadpeak
Joshua Pressnell Joshua Pressnell
Chief Technology Officer,
Penthera
Pierre-Louis Theron Pierre-Louis Theron
CEO & Co-founder
Streamroot
Johan Bolin Johan Bolin
Chief Product & Technology Officer,
Edgeware AB
Steve Miller-Jones Steve Miller-Jones
Vice President of Product Strategy
Limelight Networks
Jason Thibeault Moderator:
Jason Thibeault

Executive Director
Streaming Video Alliance