Pytomo: A tool for analyzing playback quality of YouTube videos

Online video services account for a major part of broadband traffic with streaming videos being one of the most popular video services. We focus on the user perceived quality of YouTube videos as it can serve as a general index for customer satisfaction. Our tool, Pytomo [1], is a tomography tool that is designed to measure the playback quality of videos as if they are being viewed by a user. We model the YouTube video player to estimate the playback interruptions as experienced by a user watching a YouTube video. We also examine topology and download statistics such as delay towards the server, download rates, and buffering duration. We aim to analyze different DNS resolvers to obtain the IP address of the video server. We study how the DNS resolution impacts the performance of the video download, and thus, the video playback quality. As the tool is intended to run on multiple ISPs, we have discovered some interesting results in YouTube distribution policies. These results can be applied to any content-delivery networks (CDN) architecture and should help users to better understand what are the key performance factors of video streaming.

I. Introduction

Currently, web-driven contents represent about half of the Internet traffic due to the decrease of P2P and the surge of video sharing sites [2], [3], [4], with YouTube being the most popular. Among the different online video services, streaming videos and flash videos are the most popular ones. Services such as blogs and social networks are also enabling users to embed personal videos, and thus, expand video sharing circles.