DVC: An Deductable Video Coding for Video Broadcast in Highly Dynamic Networks

Today’s mobile video codecs suffer from vulnerability to the high network dynamics. When the network effective bandwidth varies in a large range and is not predictable, e.g., in a high-speed mobile environment or being with intense wireless interference, the videos are continuously choppy and jerky, waiting for the buffer to fill before playing. In this paper, we design and implement a novel video codec scheme called DVC that provides the following properties: 1) Keep the video compression rate as the modern video codec schemes, such as H.265; 2) Non-blocking playback for video decoding; 3) High tolerance to network dynamics. Different from existing robust video codec designs that try to provide certain redundancy to compensate the network transmission losses, DVC assumes that transmission losses are inevitable. And thus the design philosophy is to mitigate the consequence of the data loss by restraining the error propagation caused by the losses, rather than the loss itself. We implement DVC with a encoder and a decoder and conducted comprehensive evaluations based on the prototype systems. Experimental results show that the video quality (PSNR) can be significantly improved by 4dB to 10dB, espeically when the videos have low amount of movement, e.g., news report.