Comparative Study of Hardware and Software Power Measurements in Video Compression

The environmental impact of video streaming services has been discussed as part of the strategies towards sustainable information and communication technologies. A first step towards that is the energy profiling and assessment of energy consumption of existing video technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive study of power measurement techniques for video encoding and decoding that is comparing the use of hardware and software power meters. An experimental methodology to ensure reliability of measurements is introduced. Key findings demonstrate the high correlation of hardware and software based energy measurements for the case of two video codecs across different spatial and temporal resolutions at a lower computational overhead.