Adaptive pre-recorded multimedia streaming

Lately, multimedia-related Internet applications have become very popular, and make up an increasing percentage of network traffic. This paper presents a quality-of-transmission-orientated adaptive mechanism for streaming of pre-recorded multimedia content. It aims at maintaining the continuity of both the transmission and the remote stream play-out, at the expense of varying the stream´s quality. A feedback scheme, in conjunction with a quality of transmission grading scheme, allows the server to learn the current network conditions. During transmission, the server can switch between different quality versions of the same multimedia content at certain checkpoints to modify the quality of the overall streaming process, and therefore the transferred quantity of data. Preliminary statistical and user perceptual test results from our prototype system show that by using our adaptive mechanism in increased traffic conditions, the users´ satisfaction was higher than if a receiver buffering solution was used.