What is it about?

Allowing digital video users to make choices of picture size and codec would significantly reduce energy usage, electric- ity costs and the carbon footprint of Internet users. Our empirical investigation shows a difference of up to a factor of 3 in energy usage for video decoding using different codecs at the same picture size and bitrate, on a desktop client system.

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Why is it important?

With video traffic already responsible for the largest and fastest growing proportion of traffic on the Internet, a significant amount of energy, money and carbon output is due to video. We present a simple methodology and metrics that can be used to give an intuitive, quantitative and com- parable assessment of the energy usage of video decoding. Providing energy usage information to users would empower them to make sensible choices. We demonstrate how small energy savings for individual client systems could give sig- nificant energy savings when considered at a global scale.

Perspectives

Suitably informed users could provide economic and en- vironmental benefits when using video. We have presented empirical results from our test-bed evaluations of the system energy usage of decoding and encoding of video streams. We examined seven popular codecs: FLV, H.264, H.265 (HEVC), MPEG4-II, Microsoft MPEG4-II (MSMPEG4), VP8 and VP9. Using a simple, measurement-based method- ology, we have shown that the differences in energy usage between these codecs can be significant, e.g. a factor of 3 between decoding FLV and H.265 at a large picture size (1080p), and up to a factor of 10 for encoding.

Prof Saleem N Bhatti
University of St Andrews

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This page is a summary of: Help Save The Planet, November 2014, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/2647868.2654897.
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