Investigations into Video Streaming

As part of my studies, Max Crone and I have been working together in a course called “Applications and Services in Internet”. It focused on different video streaming applications which are widely used on the internet.

#  An Analysis of the YouTube CDN

This report is a research into the video distribution and caching strategies employed by YouTube. We collect data from multiple continents for a multitude of videos. Our analyses find geolocations of cache servers used by YouTube, measure their performance and interpret the cache host names. Our data did not support any clear strategy based on time of the week or region, with the exception of the case for uploading a video, in which the region of upload had a clear advantage for the first hour after publishing compared to other regions. We conclude by formulating our expectation that the distribution and caching in YouTube’s infrastructure is currently largely governed by machine learning models and therefore our research could not find a clearly discernible strategy.

Download PDF: An Analysis of the YouTube CDN


#  An analysis of adaptive video streaming with DASH

In this report we investigate the behaviour of Adap- tive Bitrate Streaming with the DASH protocol under different network conditions with regard to video quality and fairness between clients. We found that the adaption to static and changing network conditions works quite well to always provide clients with the highest possible video quality while minimizing buffering delays.

Download PDF: An analysis of adaptive video streaming with DASH


#  Live streaming latency of streaming protocols

In this report we set up a live streaming server using a combination of stateless and stateful protocols, based on which we evaluate the performance of these different protocols with regards to latency. As expected, we find that a stateful protocol like RTMP has the lowest latency while suffering from scalability limitations. Stateless protocols, such as HLS and DASH, exhibit a higher latency but are easier to scale, e.g. by using a CDN which we also analyzed. Specific fine-tuning of the streaming parameters for the stateless protocols is found to bring down their end-to-end-latency.

Download PDF: Live streaming latency of streaming protocols


We hope you find these articles helpful. For details, setup scripts and more, check out the source repository: https://version.aalto.fi/gitlab/henschj1/apps-2019