#adaptivebitrate

Videos are visually stimulating and shareable entertainment media. They are everywhere on the World Wide Web and are created by millions of online entrepreneurs (as well as mere netizens) who have access to any camera or mobile device that enable them to capture all kinds of scenes.

They can also be in the form of graphic animations in 2D and 3D. Videos are very popular because they tell stories even without the need of lines or words. However, with the widespread establishment of network access around the globe, the internet is beginning to suffer from data crowding, and data traffic has become messy and slow. Since videos pack large amounts of data to be transmitted or delivered over servers, methods of preventing traffic bursts needed to be applied on every single video found on the internet. These methods, in general, are called video optimization techniques. Video optimization has become a protocol in order to maintain the fair sharing of data among millions of internet users. If data traffic is uncontrolled, the results will affect many networks and ISPs. In this case, some users might end up not receiving any data because most of the available data are being transmitted or delivered only to some other users at a certain time. There are six primary techniques for video optimization that are applied in every video transmission: Pacing Transrating Transcoding Full Transcoding Adaptive Bitrate Techniques The Cloud. Pacing

It is a “rate limiting” technique that slows down or delays the delivery of data traffic to a computer or mobile device in order to avoid traffic bursts. This is done in the attempt of saving data in the event of possible cancellation or abortion of the data transfer requested. This technique is usually seen as the instance where a video is loading or “buffering,” and evidenced by the graying of the video’s progress bar during play mode. The video data, by technique, is not delivered in its entirety but delivered bit by bit until the whole object is loaded fully. Video Transrating

It is the modification of the video input stream. The modification is done if, after analysis, it is determined that the content’s bitrate may be reduced without changing the video’s quality, the resolution of the device that sends the data request would do fine with a video of reduced bitrate, or the network from which the data request was channeled could only accommodate data with a lower bitrate. This modification technique, however, is only limited to video quantization parameters. Transrating cannot modify the resolution, codec, and other parameters of the videos. Transcoding

It modifies the videos’ codec parameters according to the device. If it is detected that the device sending the request cannot accommodate the original codec format of the video, it will be decoded and recoded into another format that the device can read. Full Transcoding It is the modification of both the codec and the resolution while maintaining the original quality of the requested data or content. The Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) technique

It is an automation of adjustments of the requested contents by codec, resolution, and bitrate. It should first determine if the traffic on the network of the device is too congested to allow delivery of the video’s original stream rate. If the congestion has been determined, the video’s stream rate will be automatically modified upon the delivery of data. The Cloud

Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) is a new feature which enables broadcasters to push the content in multiple streams in different bitrate and resolution, like high quality and low quality, which can be delivered to the users based on their connection speed. This breaks the barrier when the user’s connection speed does not match the bitrate of the stream as ABR delivers the stream that is appropriate for the users download speed.

We are glad to have this rocking feature added to our console, which is good news for our existing as well  as upcoming clients.

You cannot force or ask users to have specific connection speed to watch the stream smoothly. The connection speed differs between user to user. Setting up the stream into multiple bitrates would result in smooth delivery of the content to the user’s destination. When the user requests for the content, the server will automatically identifies the user’s connection speed, and delivers the stream that matches the connection speed. Even the user with low downspeed can get the stream without any disruption.

Let us see how to use Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) feature in our console.

Choose the ABR option while creating the publishing point option to switch on to the adaptive bitrate streaming mode

And while creating the stream name, you have to set the stream into multi-bitrates