A Comparative Quality Assessment Study for Gaming and Non-Gaming Videos

Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in video traffic with the rise of Over The Top (OTT) services. Along with traditional Video on demand (VoD) streaming services (e.g., Netflix, YouTube), live video services (e.g., Twitch.tv, YouTubeGaming, Facebook Live) have also resulted in a tremendous share of Internet traffic. Among the live streaming services, gaming video streaming has a major share, with Twitch.tv alone currently responsible for the fourth highest peak Internet traffic in the US. As a consequence of this, and due to the fact that gaming videos are artificial and synthetic, it is worth investigating the specificity of gaming videos in relation to compression and the consequent end user QoE. In this paper, we present an objective and subjective quality comparison study for regular videos and gaming videos, with 30 video sequences (15 per type), encoded using the state of the art encoder HEVC. We discuss the similarity and dissimilarity between the two video types and also discuss how these observations can be used to improve the end user QoE.