Adaptive Streaming of HEVC Tiled Videos Using MPEG-DASH

Abstract

Adaptive streaming technologies are used heavily to deliver video content over the Internet, but still face problems in networks with limited bandwidth, for videos with ultra-high definition (UHD) or greater, even when using the latest High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. In this paper, we propose a solution to these problems based on three things: a specific HEVC-compliant motion-constrained tiled encoding allowing tile-based decoding and rendering; a specific derivation of the ISO base media file format enabling a tile-based encapsulation and delivery; and their use in adaptive streaming of tiled video content using MPEG dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP requiring only a single standard HEVC decoder on the client side. We present an evaluation of constrained and unconstrained HEVC tiling compression, and also of the associated packaging and streaming overheads. The results of this evaluation indicate that our approach incurs a complete overhead of at most 7.3% for UHD content, at 10 Mbps or above, when split in 25 tiles, and only 3.5% for nine tiles, when compared with the streaming of the non-tiled video. Our approach also comes with a small impact on client-side players but provides the interesting benefit of being able to deliver UHD videos over bandwidth-constrained networks adaptively, based on its tiled content.