Analysis of packet loss and delay variation on QoE for H.264 andWebM/VP8 Codecs

Abstract: The popularity of multimedia services over Internet has increased in the recent years. These services include Video on Demand (VoD) and mobile TV which are predominantly growing, and the user expectations towards the quality of videos are gradually increasing. Different video codec’s are used for encoding and decoding. Recently Google has introduced the VP8 codec which is an open source compression format. It is introduced to compete with existing popular codec namely H.264/AVC developed by ITU-T Video Coding Expert Group (VCEG), as by 2016 there will be a license fee for H.264. In this work we compare the performance of H.264/AVC and WebM/VP8 in an emulated environment. NetEm is used as an emulator to introduce delay/delay variation and packet loss. We have evaluated the user perception of impaired videos using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) by following the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Recommendations Absolute Category Rating (ACR) and analyzed the results using statistical methods. It was found that both video codec’s exhibit similar performance in packet loss, But in case of delay variation H.264 codec shows better results when compared to WebM/VP8. Moreover along with the MOS ratings we also studied the effect of user feelings and online video watching experience impacts on their perception.