Offering Streaming Rate Adaptation to Common Media Players

This paper describes an adaptive streaming technique that exploits temporal concatenation of H264/AVC video bit-streams and uses only standard RTCP reports as feedback mechanism. As a result, common media players like VLC, QuickTime or GStreamer based, can be used in a streaming session with improved viewing experience when accessing video content through bandwidth constrained connections. Further, an original probing technique that uses video packets as probing data has been developed in order to assess whether the available bandwidth allows streaming at a higher bitrate, maximizing thus video quality and user experience. The proposed solution has been tested in real wireless scenarios, showing that video quality can indeed be improved even for standard media players.