QoE based comparison of H.264/AVC and WebM/VP8 in an error-prone wireless network

Abstract

Quality of Experience (QoE) management is a prime topic of research community nowadays as video streaming, online gaming and security applications are completely reliant on the network service quality. Moreover, there are no standard models to map Quality of Service (QoS) into QoE. HTTP media streaming is primarily used for such applications due to its coherence with the Internet and simplified management. The most common video codecs used for video streaming are H.264/AVC and Google's VP8. In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of these two codecs from the perspective of QoE. The most common end-user medium for accessing video content is via home based wireless networks. We have emulated an error-prone wireless network with different scenarios involving packet loss, packet delay and delay variation. The focus of this paper is evaluating the end user satisfaction with the multimedia content by subjective assessment using Mean Opinion Score (MOS). We have observed the overall superiority of H.264/AVC but the VP8 codec strongly gains ground in highly error-prone networks in terms of user satisfaction.