R-D optimized media streaming enhanced with adaptive media playout

Streaming media systems buffer media data at the client to improve reconstruction quality at the cost of latency. Reconstruction quality may be further improved with rate-distortion optimized packet transmission. In this paper we show how the tradeoff between buffering latency and reconstruction quality can be improved with adaptive media playout (AMP) - the client-controlled manipulation of the playout speeds of media frames. We then show how to incorporate AMP into an existing framework for rate-distortion optimized packet transmission. The resulting receiver-driven scheme jointly optimizes packet transmissions and playout speeds with respect to rate, distortion and the subjective cost of playout speed variations. Results for a short media clip show a more than 2 dB improvement in mean PSNR for R-D optimized transmission combined with a moderate amount of AMP, over R-D optimized transmission alone.