A Practical and Scalable Method for Streaming Omni-Directional Video to Web Users

Abstract

With the advent of low-cost capturing hardware, omnidirectional or panoramic video is likely to become a more popular delivery format for video content in the near future. Besides the inherent advantage of being able to capture anything within a scene without intervention from a director or camera operator, the format also increases the interactivity for the end-user and may result in a more immersive experience. To stream this kind of content to a wide range of end-users, a web-based delivery platform is clearly preferred. Unfortunately, a lack of uniform codec and streaming container format support hinders practical deployment, especially for live content distribution. In this paper, a solution is proposed that overcomes these issues for most browsers currently in use by desktop computers. It consists of a back-end module that encodes and encapsulates content into a WebM compliant streamable format in real-time, which is subsequently decoded by the built-in browser decoders and displayed through an HTML5 'canvas' element - either through a planar projection in 2D or through a 3D spherical texture transformation in WebGL. The proposed solution has been deployed on an existing CDN and tested for scalability in the context of a day-long event with omni-directional webcasts.