HTTP Live Streaming for zoomable video

Abstract

HTTP Live Streaming is a HTTP-based media streaming communication protocol implemented by Apple Inc. It provides the solution for encoding, storing and transferring media data, making the streaming session fully over standard HTTP and it can automatically adapt to the available data rate. VLC media player is an open source media player developed by Vide- oLAN project. It comprises a multimedia player, encoders and streamers which support various media formats, including HTTP Live Streaming Pro- tocol. However, VLC media player and HTTP Live Streaming Protocol are not designed to support region-of-interest (RoI) based streaming video play- back. Dynamic RoI zooming and panning operations are not supported in a server/client distribution model. In this paper, we present a RoI-based streaming system over HTTP Live Streaming Protocol, using VLC media player to playback the media stream- ing at client side. Firstly, we propose a tiled streaming solution to encode, segment, transmit, decode and reconstruct the media stream, which sup- ports zooming and panning operations with dynamic RoI. Secondly, new extended information tags and rules are defined over HTTP Live Stream- ing Protocol to support a zoomable feature for video streaming. Thirdly, we design a new architecture for the VLC media player which supports the downloading and simultaneous decoding of multiple streams and the recon- struction of the streams for the playback of synchronized RoI frames. Such an integrated approach provides a zoomable video streaming system over HTTP Live Streaming Protocol. Moreover, the resolution of RoI is adap- tive to RoI size. Our experimental study shows that the system can offer a smooth switch between different zoomable levels and different tiled streams when a user makes zooming or panning operations.