Video Rate Adaptation in Mobile Devices via HTTP Progressive Download of Stitched Media Files

Network intensive video delivery often employs dynamic rate adaptation to trade off video quality for lower bandwidth. In this letter we describe a scheme for providing deterministic rate adaptation (RA) for mobile devices with limited native media player capabilities. The proposed scheme provides a client-side proxy and stitched media file (SMF) architecture for using native media player seek operations to perform RA. The proxy uses standard HTTP for retrieving the SMF from standard HTTP servers via reliable, optimized content delivery networks. The SMF concatenates multiple bitrate encodings in a single file enabling seek-based RA. Low latency seek operations provide finer granularity RA and lower latency rate switches compared with segment-based RA schemes.