[foms] What data is needed for adaptive stream switching?

[Frank Galligan]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Chris Pearce <chris at pearce.org.nz> wrote:

> Thanks for explaining Mark. Much appreciated.
>
> On 24/11/2010 6:51 a.m., Mark Watson wrote:
> > This is where there is scope for experimentation. What I think would be
> great is to define an API which can indicate these decision points, provide
> the two data sets (past incoming bandwidth) and (future bitrate of each
> stream) at some sufficient level of generality and indicate back the
> decision. Then we can experiment with more and less complex input data and
> more and less complex decision algorithms.
>
> So in terms of what changes to browsers we'd need to make to start
> experimenting, we'd need to resurrect the @bufferedBytes attribute, add
> a @currentOffset attribute, and add some way for JS to access the
> RAP/keyframe index?

I'm not sure what exposing the RAP to the JS for each stream buys you over
just having a simple switch stream api. Let me back up a bit.

At a high level I think we want the media pipeline to expose information
about the current presentation to the player through a script interface.
Then the player can make decisions about what stream the media
pipeline should be rendering. The decisions made by the player are it's best
guess so the media pipeline will not stall for any reason. We want to do
this because trying to define an algorithm that all default players must
implement is going to be extremely hard. This is my view from reading over
the posts on this list.

So to me I don't think that a JS player really cares that the media pipeline
switches to stream N at byte offset X (of course the media pipeline does).
All the player cares about is that the media pipeline switch to stream N as
soon as possible. I.E. The player decides that the CPU load is too great and
wants to switch to a lower resolution as soon as possible seamlessly. Or the
player decides that the bandwidth looks high enough that it would like to
switch to a higher bandwidth stream as soon as possible seamlessly.

I think having an API that is SwitchTo(index, discontinuous); should be good
enough for now. (I added a discontinuous parameter in case the player wanted
to switch and didn't care about it being seamless.) Are there any reasons we
need to expose RAPs to the player?

I can think of a corner case, but I don't think the added complexity to the
interface and to the player developer is worth it. The case I'm thinking of
is the player wants to switch to a lower bandwidth stream but stream N which
the player wants to switch to doesn't have a RAP for 10 seconds while stream
N-1, which has bandwidth < stream N, has a RAP 2 seconds out. If people felt
strongly about handling this case we could expose an API like
SwitchDown(attribute); Then there would also be an API call that can control
the heuristics if the media pipeline had to switch to another stream with a
lower value attribute than the desired stream.

Maybe we should add the @bufferedBytes data into
> @buffered, so you can easily map buffered time ranges to byte ranges? I
> guess these would have to be per-stream if we're playing multiple
> independent streams.
>
> Or would you prefer an explicit download bandwidth and a per stream
> bitrate measure, calculated by the browser, over a specified time window?
>
> In terms of an API which can indicate decision points, maybe an event
> which fires when playback enters a new chunk? Or fires when the download
> of a chunk finishes? Be aware we can't guarantee that any DOM events
> which we fire will arrive in a particularly timely manner, there could
> be any number of other things going on with the event queue.
>
This is another reason that I think a higher level API for the player is
better.


>
> Is there a direct mapping between a keyframe index and RAP points? What
> about audio streams in containers which don't index audio? Particularly
> in the case where we're playing multiple independent streams.
>
For WebM I wrote a tool that would create an index file for an audio stream.

Frank



> Chris P.
>
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