ADAPTIVE BANDWIDTH SWITCHING VIA SHORT-CIRCUITABLE DOWNLOAD

摘要

Stalling of segment downloads during adaptive bandwidth switching where bandwidth drops in the midst of download of a segment is overcome by downloading segments in multiple subsegments via multiple download operations. Additionally, bandwidth monitoring can be performed in between each subsegment download, and if bandwidth has fallen substantially, and the segment download is not near completion, then the already-downloaded subsegments can be discarded, and the segment download can be restarted from a lower-quality variant.

主权项

1. A system comprising:
a network interface configured to download segments of an original media file from a server via multiple download operations, each download operation of a subsegment of a segment encoded at a first quality; a client buffer for storing the subsegments; a bandwidth monitoring module configured to:
determine a bandwidth of a network connection between the network interface and the server; anddecide whether a current one of the segments should be downloaded at a second quality different from the first quality, and if so:
discard downloaded subsegments of the current one of the segments from the client buffer; anddownload the current one of the segments encoded at a second quality.