Evaluation of the Performance of Adaptive HTTP Streaming Systems

Adaptive video streaming over HTTP is becoming omnipresent in our daily life. In the past, dozens of research papers have proposed novel approaches to address different aspects of adaptive streaming and a decent amount of player implementations (commercial and open source) are available. However, state of the art evaluations are sometimes superficial as many proposals only investigate a certain aspect of the problem or focus on a specific platform - player implementations used in actual services are rarely considered. HTML5 is now available on many platforms and foster the deployment of adaptive media streaming applications. We propose a common evaluation framework for adaptive HTML5 players and demonstrate its applicability by evaluating eight different players which are actually deployed in real-world services.