Efficient bitrate ladder construction for live video streaming

Vignesh V. Menon, Hadi Amirpour, Mohammad Ghanbari, Christian Timmerer

Abstract: In live streaming applications, service providers generally use a bitrate ladder with fixed bitrate-resolution pairs instead of optimizing it per title to avoid the additional latency caused to find optimum bitrate-resolution pairs for every video content. This paper introduces an online bitrate ladder construction scheme for live video streaming applications. In this scheme, each target bitrate's optimized resolution is determined from any pre-defined set of resolutions using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-energy-based low-complexity spatial and temporal features for each video segment. Experimental results show that, on average, the proposed scheme yields significant bitrate savings while maintaining the same quality, compared to the HLS fixed bitrate ladder scheme without any noticeable additional latency in streaming.