Video Codecs, and Rapidly Adapting to Network Conditions
“ Genius lies in inventing stuff that is totally obvious in retrospect ” — Me Every now and then you see stuff that genuinely surprises you. Oh, not in the “ it’s a floor-wax and a salad-dressing ” sense, but in the “ good god, that is so ridiculously obvious, why didn’t I think of that? ” sense. Fouladi et al (•). have pulled off two of these with their new approach to video encoding — in their approach to architecting streaming video, and actually writing the codecs Video Streaming Let’s look at the architecture first. Most (all?) video streaming systems these days have two major components, a codec to encode the video, and a transport protocol to get it to the destination. The way the system usually works is that that the transport protocol figures out the network capacity the best it can, by looking at congestion, RTT, etc. The codec then uses the capacity to figure out what levels of compression to apply to the video, so that t...