Whether on laptop or smartphone, buffering is a universal feeling experienced by all of us trying to watch a video over the Internet. And it has this annoying habit of showing up just when you least expect it.
Video buffering animation is definitely one of the saddest things you'll come across, especially when you're all set to watch the newest episodes of Sacred Games or any other of your favourite online video.
iStock
Even though India's 6.5Mbps average (with India ranking 97th in internet speeds) should be theoretically fine to stream video files without buffering, yet buffering is part and parcel of video streaming in India. But what if I told you that our video-buffering woes are soon going to be a thing of the past?
Whenever you connect your devices on a particular Wi-Fi network, the router, using the Wi-Fi protocols, equally splits the available bandwidth equally among these devices. While this might sound cool in theory, majority of the time one user who'd need more bandwidth won't get any and another user has bandwidth at his disposal that he doesn't even utilise. Researchers at MIT have found a solution to fix just this scenario.?
Researcher group from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT have created a tool to help efficient bandwidth allocation while buffering videos called the Minerva system. Minerva scrutinises videos (at an offline level) and denotes playback quality depending on screen resolution, content etc.?
Reuters
For example, you're streaming a cricket match on the TV screen in your hall, while your younger sibling is streaming Japanese anime on a smartphone in the bedroom. In the current situation, while your brother won't notice a quality drop while watching 2D animations, your viewing experience will be adversely affected as a quality drop in a live match will be easily noticeable. That's where Minerva will come in handy.?
Minerva will make the most of its sorcery, where it'll know which stream will be affected the most with a slower internet connection and dedicate bandwidth accordingly -- all while its offline.?
This way, researchers have witnessed that Minerva was able to reduce buffering time almost by half. Moreover, in one third of cases Minerva was able to offer considerable improvements to video playback quality.
What's best is that this can not only be implemented at a household level, but streaming giants like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix could also use this approach and implement it in their standard TCP/IP protocol, without the need of changing any hardware.?