Viewport dependent MPEG-DASH streaming of 360 degree natively tiled HEVC video in web browser context

Abstract

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC has been the mainstream video consumption standard for years. However, with the current diversity of services, the still growing popularity of high quality videos, and continuously increasing video resolution and qualities, a more efficient coding performance is demanded than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC can supply. Therefor, new video codecs are being developed to support these high resolution videos. One of those video standards is H.265/HEVC which supports for the same quality videos up to 50% decrease in size compared to H.264.

We started by asking ourselves if the HEVC tiled MPEG-DASH stream can be reformed to a native tiled HEVC video in the web browser. The restructure of the tile stream is needed to play the HEVC video content. This is done by remapping the input streams for each tile into one native tiled video bit stream which the HEVC decoder can then decode. By doing this, video playback is possible. In this thesis, we test and implement the restructure process for 360 degree video in a web application and measure the preprocessing times to show if live playback is feasible.