User Generated HDR Gaming Video Streaming: Dataset, Codec Comparison and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new HDR gaming video dataset, compares the compression efficiency of popular codecs on such content, and discusses challenges in streaming high-quality gaming videos.

Contribution

It provides a novel HDR gaming video dataset and evaluates the performance of multiple codecs, highlighting AV1's superior compression efficiency for UHD-HDR gaming content.

Findings

AV1 achieves the best compression efficiency among tested codecs.

HEVC outperforms H.264 and VP9 in compression efficiency.

The dataset enables objective evaluation of HDR gaming videos.

Abstract

Gaming video streaming services have grown tremendously in the past few years, with higher resolutions, higher frame rates and HDR gaming videos getting increasingly adopted among the gaming community. Since gaming content as such is different from non-gaming content, it is imperative to evaluate the performance of the existing encoders to help understand the bandwidth requirements of such services, as well as further improve the compression efficiency of such encoders. Towards this end, we present in this paper GamingHDRVideoSET, a dataset consisting of eighteen 10-bit UHD-HDR gaming videos and encoded video sequences using four different codecs, together with their objective evaluation results. The dataset is available online at [to be added after paper acceptance]. Additionally, the paper discusses the codec compression efficiency of most widely used practical encoders, i.e., x264 (H.264/AVC), x265 (H.265/HEVC) and libvpx (VP9), as well the recently proposed encoder libaom (AV1), on 10-bit, UHD-HDR content gaming content. Our results show that the latest compression standard AV1 results in the best compression efficiency, followed by HEVC, H.264, and VP9.