TAPAS-360°: a Tool for the Design and Experimental Evaluation of 360° Video Streaming Systems

TAPAS-360° is a tool that allows rapid prototyping of Adaptive Streaming control algorithms and viewport-adaptive algorithms for omnidirectional video streaming.

If you are a developer and you want to design an test a new Adaptive Streaming control algorithm or a viewport adaptive algorithm, please check the documentation placed in the doc/ directory.

If you are a user and you want to experiment with the control algorithms made available by TAPAS-360° you can follow the instructions given below in the "Usage" section.

Installation

For Ubuntu-based Linux distributions install the following building dependencies (also collected in dependencies.txt):

apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-twisted
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-twisted-bin
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-twisted-core
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-twisted-web
apt-get install --no-install-recommends gstreamer1.0-plugins-*
apt-get install --no-install-recommends gstreamer1.0-tools
apt-get install --no-install-recommends gstreamer1.0-libav
apt-get install --no-install-recommends libgstreamer1.0-dev
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-gst-1.0
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-gobject
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-numpy
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-scipy
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3-psutil
apt-get install --no-install-recommends gir1.2-gtk-3.0

Building TAPAS-360° docker image

TAPAS-360° is shipped with easy-to-use scripts that help with building and running a docker image to perform experiments with the tool.

To build the tapas-360 docker image simply run:

./build_tapas360_dockerimage.sh

Then, use the helper script

./run_tapas360_docker.sh

to run TAPAS-360°. Notice that the last script assumes you can run docker without sudo (see the Docker documentation).

Usage

Play a default playlist:

$ python3 play.py

Play a default playlist with a "conventional" adaptive controller:

$ python3 play.py --controller conventional

Play a playlist specified by its URL:

$ python3 play.py --url http://mysite.com/myplaylist.m3u8

Play a sample MPEG-DASH video:

$ python3 play.py --url http://yt-dash-mse-test.commondatastorage.googleapis.com/media/car-20120827-manifest.mpd

Play an omnidirectional content: Play a MPEG-DASH omnidirectional content (DASH playlist is courtesy of Bitmovin): ::

$ python3 play.py --vr True --url http://bitmovin-a.akamaihd.net/content/playhouse-vr/mpds/105560.mpd

Play omnidirectional content using the provided "conventional" viewport adaptive strategy (HLS playlist is courtesy of Bitmovin):

$ python3 play.py --vr True --view_controller conventional --url http://bitmovin-a.akamaihd.net/content/playhouse-vr/m3u8s/105560.m3u8

Play a playlist for logs, without decoding video:

$ python3 play.py --media_engine nodec

Play a playlist with a fake player (emulated playout buffer and no decoding):

$ python3 play.py --media_engine fake

Play only the highest quality of the playlist:

$ python3 play.py --controller max

Player options:

$ python3 play.py --help

To Enable debug just define the variable DEBUG to a value lager than 1:

$ DEBUG=2 python3 play.py

Emulating HMD movement with public datasets

TAPAS-360° allows to emulate the user's head position by reading a Comma Separated Values (.csv) file containing the angular data jointly with a timestamp related to playback time. The format is simply

time,alpha,beta,gamma

where:

• time is the timestamp in seconds
• alpha is the yaw angle in degrees
• beta is the pitch angle in degrees
• gamma is the roll angle in degrees

A list of publicly available datasets that can be easily used with TAPAS-360° includes:

1. http://dash.ipv6.enstb.fr/headMovements/
2. https://www.interdigital.com/data_sets/salient-360-dataset
3. https://github.com/V-Sense/VR_user_behaviour

It is our plan to provide helper scripts to convert those dataset to a format that is understood by the default HMD emulator provided by TAPAS-360°. Of course, it is always possible modifying the HMD behavior by, f.i., inheriting from the HMDEmulator class.

Documentation

Documentation can be built using sphinx. To build the documentation in HTML format:

cd docs/sphinx
make html

The documentation will be made available in docs/sphinx/_build/html. Many other options are available (f.i., Latex, epub, etc), run make to discover all of them.

Features to be implemented soon

[ ] Saliency maps data integration: to allow the design of saliency-based viewport adaptive algorithms

You are encouraged to submit feature requests in the Issues section.