MIT Researchers Use Machine Learning to Kill Video Buffering

[Megalith]

Researchers have developed a solution for reducing video rebuffering using machine learning: the system, dubbed “Pensieve,” figures out the optimal algorithm to use for delivering video at the best possible resolution while avoiding buffering breaks. Current systems employed on YouTube, Netflix, and similar sites have to make a trade-off between the quality of the video versus how often it has to rebuffer, but Pensieve utilizes AI that knows what works best in various conditions, potentially cutting rebuffering by up to 30 percent.

Pensieve doesn’t need a model or any existing assumptions about things like network speed. It represents an ABR algorithm as a neural network and repeatedly tests it in situations that have a wide range of buffering and network speed conditions. The system tunes its algorithms through a system of rewards and penalties. For example, it might get a reward anytime it delivers a buffer-free, high-resolution experience, but a penalty if it has to rebuffer. “It learns how different strategies impact performance, and, by looking at actual past performance, it can improve its decision-making policies in a much more robust way.”

 

[JosiahBradley]

No more dynamic scaling please. I choose 1080p or 4K I want 1080p or 4K let it buffer just don't stutter. The problem is all these restrictions on bandwidth and poorly configured networks sold and over provisioned for speeds unreachable by the number of clients on the network.

 

[Seventyfive]

No more dynamic scaling please. I choose 1080p or 4K I want 1080p or 4K let it buffer just don't stutter. The problem is all these restrictions on bandwidth and poorly configured networks sold and over provisioned for speeds unreachable by the number of clients on the network.

QFT. 99.999% of the time it's not even me. I have 1gbps fiber and I still get buffering issues on one site but not on others so it's either the host or something along the route.

The other bizarre thing is if i watch a regular Youtube video I can choose 4k, it buffers and plays fine. If I rent a movie from google play, it will not let me choose the resolution and auto scale down to as low as 480p and I can't even figure out why since, as I said above, I have fucking gigabit fiber and 4k videos from the same damn host play fine.

 

[niconx]

Why you don't get the speed you pay for:
Step 1) Customer pays ISP bill.
Step 2) ISP uses that money to buy another ISP or a content creator instead of reinvesting into what the customer is actually paying for and using
Step 3) Slow speed and disappearance of net neutrality as an excuse to monetize further even though it is not financially necessary

Religious commitment to the invisible hand leads to anarchist capitalism and that fails to create innovation and competition, especially when giant corporations are involved. It also eliminates fair compensation resulting in $2/hr Chinese labor, totally devaluing labor in general. This extends to skilled college educated labor being remote outsourced as well. Wealth ends up being hoarded for people and corporations to achieve artificially high unearned income. Today we view slavery as exploitative, just as 200 years from now our economic exploitation of developing nations will be viewed as similarly exploitative economic slavery resulting in a kind of indentured servitude impossible to crawl out from, inside a fixed system hoarding wealth towards those who have not earned it. This is all a relic of the entitled nobility class. Capitalism needs to be reworked to place value on labor, education, and products, the uneducated greedy jackasses in DC are not the ones to do it. Who is?

 

[Navilor]

I started my career in the streaming media industry at RealNetworks (*** BUFFERING ***) back in February 2008. I cut my teeth on RTSP supporting their now discontinued Helix Server. Around 2011 I became the on site encoding expert at RealNetworks where both internal and external customers would be referred to me if they had a problem with their content. I have a reference to a blog post I wrote in Jan Ozer's book Video Encoding by the Numbers on page 109 in the chapter Choosing Data Rate that deals with how to find a better bitrate for your content. Netflix encoded content using QP to find a better bitrate and would then create an actual streaming media file. I used CRF 21 for my bitrate detection for about a year or so before Netflix announced what they did. Netflix changed over to using CRF for bitrate detection around the time of my blog post. I cannot provide any qualifying information as to who was first, so I'll settle for my CRF method coming in second to Netflix.

As we all know network bandwidth issues can happen anywhere between the source and the client and this is exactly why Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) content was developed to address so that the person can continue to watch their video without interruption. As we all know, ABR is not perfect.

ABR content is delivered via HTTP and segments are generated on keyframes. It is vitally important to ensure that your keyframe distance, also known as a group of pictures or GOP, is precise. The default GOP for x264 is 250, however it will guess when a scene change happens and insert a keyframe when it wants to. For more information on how to create proper ABR content please reference a blog post I wrote.

If this technology works the way that MIT says it will, and I am not in a position to debate their knowledge, then this is going to be a huge development for streaming media.

 

[M76]

QFT. 99.999% of the time it's not even me. I have 1gbps fiber and I still get buffering issues on one site but not on others so it's either the host or something along the route.

The other bizarre thing is if i watch a regular Youtube video I can choose 4k, it buffers and plays fine. If I rent a movie from google play, it will not let me choose the resolution and auto scale down to as low as 480p and I can't even figure out why since, as I said above, I have fucking gigabit fiber and 4k videos from the same damn host play fine.

But it's not the same damn host. They use algorithms to re-host videos based on popularity and projected plays in specific regions. So just because the domain is the same, the stream can actually come from a variety of places. It's noticeable that when I play videos that are rarely or never played from my region, the buffering will take much longer.

 

[Skylinestar]

I doubt it will work with my internet speed of 64kbps, not even youtube in 144p.