[e2e] RealVideo across the Internet

[Mark Claypool]

This past summer, we sent an email to this list requesting help in a
study of RealVideo performance over the Internet.  We have completed
preliminary analysis of the results from that study and, as promised,
are summarizing them here via an abstract:

   The tremendous increase in computer power and bandwidth
   connectivity has fueled the growth of streaming video over the
   Internet to the desktop.  While there have been large scale
   empirical studies of Internet, Web and multimedia traffic, the
   performance of popular Internet streaming video technologies and
   the impact of streaming video on the Internet is still largely
   unknown.  This paper presents analysis from a wide-scale empirical
   study of RealVideo traffic from several Internet servers to many
   geographically diverse users.  We find typical RealVideos to have
   high quality, achieving an average frame rate of 10 frames per
   second and very smooth playout, but very few videos achieve
   full-motion frame rates.  Overall video performance is most
   influenced by the bandwidth of the end-user connection to the
   Internet, but high-bandwidth Internet connections are pushing the
   video performance bottleneck closer to the server.

More details on the work, as well as pointers to online technical
papers, can be found at:

   http://perform.wpi.edu/

We would like to thank all those who helped in debugging RealTracer
during our beta testing and those that ran RealTracer and rated videos.
Without them this study would not have been possible.

thanks,
Mark

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Mark Claypool        CS Assistant Professor        claypool at cs.wpi.edu
   Worcester Polytechnic Institute   http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool