Reducing Processing Demands for Multi-Rate Video Encoding: Implementation and Evaluation

Segmented adaptive HTTP streaming has become the de facto standard for video delivery over the Internet for its ability to scale video quality to the available network resources. Here, each video is encoded in multiple qualities, i.e., running the expensive encoding process for each quality layer. However, these operations consume both a lot of time and resources, and in this paper, the authors propose a system for reusing redundant steps in a video encoder to improve the multi-layer encoding pipeline. The idea is to have multiple outputs for each of the target bitrates and qualities where the intermediate processing steps share and reuse the computational heavy analysis. A prototype has been implemented using the VP8 reference encoder, and their experimental results show that for both low- and high-resolution videos the proposed method can significantly reduce the processing demands and time when encoding the different quality layers.