Using a Commodity Hardware Video Encoder for Interactive Applications

Over the last years, video streaming has become one of the most dominant Internet services. Due to the increased availability of high-speed Internet access, multimedia services are becoming more interactive. Examples of such applications are both cloud gaming (OnLive, 2014) and systems where users can interact with high-resolution content (Gaddam et al., 2014). During the last few years, programmable hardware video encoders have been built into commodity hardware such as CPUs and GPUs. One of these encoders is evaluated in a scenario where individual streams are delivered to the end users. The results show that the visual video quality and the frame size of the hardware-based encoder are comparable to a software-based approach. To evaluate a complete system, a proposed streaming pipeline has been implemented into Quake III. It was found that running the game on a remote server and streaming the video output to a client web browser located in a typical home environment is possible and enjoyable. The interaction latency is measured to be less than 90 ms, which is below what is reported for OnLive in a similar environment