Quality Improvement for Video On-Demand Streaming over HTTP

It is crucial to provide Internet videos with the best possible content value (or quality) to users. To adapt to network fluctuations, existing solutions provide various client-based heuristics to change video versions without considering the actual quality. In this work, we present for the first time the use of a quality model in making adaptation decisions to improve the overall quality. The proposed method also estimates the buffer level in the near future to prevent the client from buffer underflows. Experiment results show that the proposed method is able to provide high and consistent video quality under strongly fluctuating bandwidths.