Oxygen TV

overview	-	what OxygenTV's all about
resources	-	links for player, encoders, etc.
papers	-	OxygenTV documents
talks	-	talks and posters
screenshots	-	some eye-candy
people	-	who are we?
links	-	related work

Overview

Streaming media is becoming increasingly prominent on the Internet. At present, many end users settle for inflexible and suboptimal proprietary streaming solutions such as Windows Media Player and RealPlayer that are proprietary and do not solve the fundamental problems associated with Internet video and thus have a very low resulting quality. While today's streaming applications are closed and proprietary, the emerging MPEG-4 standard is gaining increasing acceptance as the standard for Internet video and has great promise to change this.

However, before this can happen, many issues with regard to streaming video over the Internet must be solved. The Internet imposes packet loss on data, which can severely hamper the quality of a compressed bitstream with interdependencies. Available bandwidth varies with time, and a streaming system should adjust its sending rate and the quality of the transmitted bitstream in accordance with these changes. Delays on the Internet are variable, which causes problems for an application that wants to play out received data at a constant rate.

A successful streaming media solution requires a framework that is adaptive to:

Packet loss. When packets are lost in an inter-frame video compression scheme such as MPEG-4, errors can propagate. A streaming media system must react appropriately to these losses given bandwidth and latency constraints to maintain the quality of received video.

Variable bandwidth. Internet conditions change with time, and a video streaming system should adapt to these changes accordingly. Unlike traditional Internet applications, which seek to transmit at the highest attainable rate, video applications prefer to send data at a relatively constant bitrate. Therefore, congestion control algorithms such as TCP's additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm are not amenable to video due to their large rate oscillations.

Variable delay. The Internet imposes variable delay on packets, which poses problems for video applications, which require a smooth playout rate.

The OxygenTV project is developing an implementation of the adaptive video streaming framework that uses CM to adapt to variable bandwidth and delay and SR-RTP to perform selective retransmission for packet loss.

Currently, the OxygenTV video server uses the ffmpeg library to perform realtime encoding of video streams in multiple layers. The client requests some subset of these layers (according to the available bandwidth) and decodes and displays the stream using the ffmpeg libraries.

The client also has a plugin that provides interaction with Cricket, which allows the client to discover its the location, and an INS plugin, which retrieves the resources associated with that location (such as a larger display screen). Using this information and the Migrate plugin, a user viewing a video stream on a PDA (e.g., an Ipaq) can migrate the stream to other available displays. The client then uses SR-RTP to provide feedback to the server that display and bandwidth characteristics have changed.

Resources

Implementation of the general framework is under development, so there is no official release yet. Currently, only SR-RTP is available.

In the meantime, you can watch this video (31.8MB) showing OxygenTV in action.

Papers

Packet Loss Recovery for Streaming Video
N. Feamster and H. Balakrishnan
12th International Packet Video Workshop , Pittsburgh, PA, April 2002. [Gzipped Postscript] [PDF]
Adaptive Delivery of Real-Time Streaming Video
N. Feamster
M. Eng. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2001.
[Postscript (11.9 MB)][Gzipped Postscript (2.9 MB)][PDF (3.15 MB)](92 pages)
Winner of the William A. Martin Memorial Thesis Award, May 2001.
On the Interactions Between Layered Quality Adaptation and Congestion Control for Streaming Video,
N. Feamster, D. Bansal, and H. Balakrishnan
11th International Packet Video Workshop, Kyongju, Korea, April 2001. [Abstract] [Gzipped PostScript].

Talks and Posters

Packet Loss Recovery for Streaming Video
12th International Packet Video Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA, April 2002 [Postscript]
On the Interactions Between Congestion Control and Layered Quality Adap tation for Streaming Video
11th International Packet Video Workshop, Kyongju, Korea, May 2001. [Powerpoint]
A Framework for Adaptive Streaming of MPEG-4 Video.
ACM International Poster Competition, Charlotte, NC, February 2001. [Powerpoint]
Adaptive Video Streaming. NMS Group Meeting. June 28, 2000. [Gzipped PostScript.][PostScript]

Screenshots

People

Faculty: Hari Balakrishnan
Staff: Michel Goraczko
Students:
Nick Feamster
Allen K. Miu

Links

Some links for related work can be found here.

NMS Home Projects People Papers Software

CSAIL

E E C S

M I T

M. I. T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · 32 Vassar Street · Cambridge, MA 02139 · USA