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Videos On The World Wide Web |
The design of file systems was strongly influenced by measurements of properties of files stored on existing file systems. These characteristics included the size distribution and pattern of access. We believe that a similiar classification of video stored on the Internet will help network engineers, codec designers, and other multimedia researchers especially since little hard data exists on video on the web.
We therefore executed an experiment to measure how video data is used on the Web today. In this experiment, so far we have downloaded and analyzed over 57000 AVI, QuickTime and MPEG files stored on the Web -- approximately 100 Gigabytes of data. Among our more interesting discoveries, we have found that the most common video technology in use today is QuickTime, and that the resolution and frame rate of video data with accompanying audio is much more uniform than video-only data. That is, the majority of all audio/video files have dimensions of CIF or QCIF (or very similar) at 10, 12, 15, or 30 fps, whereas the dimensions and frame rates of video only files are more uniformly distributed. We have also experimentally verified the conjecture that current Internet bandwidth is at least an order of magnitude too slow to support streaming playback of video.
Our data acquisition scripts were written using Tcl and Tcl-Dp.
Paper giving an overview of the experiment and
key results [PostScript]
[Acrobat]
This research is supported by DARPA (contract N00014-95-1-0799), Intel, Xerox, Microsoft, and Kodak
