Hadi
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Accepted tutorial: Video Coding Advancements in HTTP Adaptive Streaming

Tutorial title: Video Coding Advancements in HTTP Adaptive Streaming

Venue: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) 2025 (https://2025.ieeeicme.org/tutorials/)

We are happy to announce that our tutorial “Video Coding Advancements in HTTP Adaptive Streaming” (by Hadi Amirpourazarian and Christian Timmerer) has been accepted for IEEE ICME 2025, which will take place in Nantes, France, June 30 – July 4, 2025.

Description: This tutorial provides a comprehensive exploration of the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) pipeline, covering advancements from content provisioning to content consumption. We begin by tracing the history of video streaming and the evolution of video coding technologies. Attendees will gain insights into the timeline of significant developments, from early proprietary solutions to modern adaptive streaming standards like HAS. A comparative analysis of video codecs is presented, highlighting milestones such as H.264, HEVC, and the latest standard, Versatile Video Coding (VVC), emphasizing their efficiency, adoption, and impact on streaming technologies. Additionally, new trends in video coding, including AI-based coding solutions, will be covered, showcasing their potential to transform video compression and streaming workflows.

Building on this foundation, we explore per-title encoding techniques, which dynamically tailor bitrate ladders to the specific characteristics of video content. These methods account for factors such as spatial resolution, frame rate, device compatibility, and energy efficiency, optimizing both Quality of Experience (QoE) and environmental sustainability. Next, we highlight cutting-edge advancements in live streaming, including novel approaches to optimizing bitrate ladders without introducing latency. Fast multi-rate encoding methods are also presented, showcasing how they significantly reduce encoding times and computational costs, effectively addressing scalability challenges for streaming providers.

The tutorial further delves into edge computing capabilities for video transcoding, emphasizing how edge-based architectures can streamline the processing and delivery of streaming content. These approaches reduce latency and enable efficient resource utilization, particularly in live and interactive streaming scenarios.

Finally, we discuss the QoE parameters that influence both streaming and coding pipelines, providing a holistic view of how QoE considerations guide decisions in codec selection, bitrate optimization, and delivery strategies. By combining historical context, theoretical foundations, and practical insights, this tutorial equips attendees with the knowledge to navigate and address the evolving challenges in video streaming applications.

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Accepted tutorial: Serverless Orchestration on the Edge-Cloud Continuum: Challenges and Solutions

Tutorial title: Serverless Orchestration on the Edge-Cloud Continuum: Challenges and Solutions

Venue: 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) (https://icpe2025.spec.org/)

We are happy to announce that our tutorial “Serverless Orchestration on the Edge-Cloud Continuum: Challenges and Solutions” (by Reza Farahani and Radu Prodan) has been accepted for ACM/SPEC ICPE 2025, which will take place in Torento, Canada, in May 2025.

 

Ria Sommer @ ITEC – Presentation on Actual Play and Let’s Play practices

On 16 January 2024, a special PhD presentation took place as a part of the ongoing open learning space organised by the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering. Ria Sommer MA from the University of Osnabrück presented her ongoing research on Actual Play and Let’s Play practices. The event was moderated by Dr Felix Schniz BA MA and visited by students from various disciplines and AAU lecturers.

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ITEC Organized the 14th International Video Retrieval Competition and Scored Well

On January 8th, 2025, the 14th Video Browser Showdown (VBS) took place at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2025), in Nara, Japan. 17 international teams competed against each other over about five hours and solved very challenging tasks. VBS is the largest international video retrieval competition and teams had to perform search in a dataset with a total of 31.715 video files and 5.930 hours, coming from the V3C, LHE, and MVK video collections. This year, in addition to the typical task types, such as KIS-V/KIS-T (known-item search with visual and textual hints), AVS (ad-hoc video search) and QA (interactive question answering), we had a new category called KIS-C (conversational known-item search), where an oracle of a few people mentioned hints and answered questions to the teams about the scene of interest. Overall, VBS2025 was a challenging and fascinating event, with a lot of fun, exciting queries, and great video retrieval systems.

We would like to thank the 17 teams with 95 unique authors from 13 countries for their participation and congratulate them to the great success at VBS2025. Congratulations in particular go to
– the NII-UIT team, who was the overall winner and provided the best expert system
– the VEAGLE team, who provided the best novice system

Also ITEC’s video retrieval system, diveXplore, performed very well and achieved the 3rd place in the overall scoring.

VBS is a huge event that requires a lot of organization efforts.
Many thanks go to Werner Bailer for creating and checking all the queries in advance, to Cathal Gurrin for doing an amazing job at moderation over 5 hours, to all the live judges (Dimitris Georgalis, Gylfi Þór Guðmundsson, Björn Þór Jónsson, Andreas Leibetseder, Laura Rettig, Heiko Schuldt, Dimitris Stefanopoulos) for assessing submissions that could not be evaluated automatically, the oracle members (Björn Þór Jónsson, Stevan Rudinac, Heiko Schuldt) for exciting query hints, the developers of the distributed retrieval evaluation servery (DRES) (Luca Rossetto, Loris Sauter, Ralph Gasser), the creators of the datasets (particularly Luca Rossetto and Sai-Kit Yeung), and all the local organizers of MMM2025 (Ichiro Ide, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, ChangSheng Xu, Keiji Yanai, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shin’ichi Satoh, Marc Kastner, and others). THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

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“Magic Academy” on 14 January, 2025

On 14 January, Dr Felix Schniz and GSE Student Peter Miklautz organised the “Magic Academy.” The event took place in the library’s Unruhezone and introduced GSE and other students to the concept of Trading Card Games. It served as an introductory event for a series of follow-up “Magic Academies”, which are scheduled for the end of this semester and over the course of next semester. The series concludes in June with a three-day event on academic perspectives on Trading Card Games, featuring international guest speakers, workshops on the mechanics, stochastics, and analytical observations on different card game systems, and an analogue game design mini-game jam.

With over 30 students attending, this kick-off was a magical success!

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Best Student Paper Award at NAB BEIT Conference 2025

The paper “Two-pass Encoding for Live Video Streaming” has been selected as the Best Student Paper at the NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference 2025.

NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference

5–9 April 2025 | Las Vegas, NV, USA

Abstract: Live streaming has become increasingly important in our daily lives due to the growing demand for real-time content consumption. Traditional live video streaming typically relies on single-pass encoding due to its low latency. However, it lacks video content analysis, often resulting in inefficient compression and quality fluctuations during playback. Constant Rate Factor (CRF) encoding, a type of single-pass method, offers more consistent quality but suffers from unpredictable output bitrate, complicating bandwidth management. In contrast, multi-pass encoding improves compression efficiency through multiple passes. However, its added latency makes it unsuitable for live streaming. In this paper, we propose OTPS, an online two-pass encoding scheme that overcomes these limitations by employing fast feature extraction on a downscaled video representation and a gradient-boosting regression model to predict the optimal CRF for encoding. This approach provides consistent quality and efficient encoding while avoiding the latency introduced by traditional multi-pass techniques. Experimental results show that OTPS offers 3.7% higher compression efficiency than single-pass encoding and achieves up to 28.1% faster encoding than multi-pass modes. Compared to single-pass encoding, encoded videos using OTPS exhibit 5% less deviation from the target bitrate while delivering notably more consistent quality.

Authors: Mohammad Ghasempour (AAU, Austria); Hadi Amirpour (AAU, Austria); Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria)

 

The 2nd IEEE ICME Workshop on Surpassing Latency Limits in Adaptive Live Video Streaming (LIVES’25)

June 30 to July 4, 2025, Nantes, France

Delivering video content from a video server to viewers over the Internet is time-consuming in the streaming workflow and has to be handled to offer an uninterrupted streaming experience. The end-to-end latency, i.e., from the camera capture to the user device, is particularly problematic for live streaming. Some streaming-based applications, such as virtual events, esports, online learning, gaming, webinars, and all-hands meetings, require low latency for their operation. Video streaming is ubiquitous in many applications, devices, and fields. Delivering high Quality-of-Experience (QoE) to the streaming viewers is crucial, while the requirement to process a large amount of data to satisfy such QoE cannot be handled with human-constrained possibilities. Satisfying the requirements of low latency video streaming applications requires the streaming workflow to be optimized and streamlined together, which includes media provisioning (capturing, encoding, packaging, an ingesting to the origin server), media delivery (from the origin to the CDN and from the CDN to the end users), media playback (end user video player). The 2nd workshop on Surpassing Latency Limits in Adaptive Live Video Streaming (LIVES 2025) aims to bring together researchers and developers to satisfy the data-intensive processing requirements and QoE challenges of live video streaming applications through leveraging heuristic and learning-based approaches.

Please click here for more information.

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HiPC Distinguished Paper Award goes to….

At the HiPC 2024 (31st IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analysis) held in Bengaluru, India from December 18-21, Haleh Dizaji received the HiPC Distinguished Paper Award for the paper “Graph Sampling Quality Prediction for Algorithm Recommendation” written together with Reza Farahani, Joze M. Rozanec, Ahmet Soylu, Dragi Kimovski and Radu Prodan. Radu Prodan who participated in the conference received the award. Congratulations!

 

 

 

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“Final Countdown” Theme Sparks Creative Innovation at Klagenfurt Game Jam”

A remarkable display of game development talent unfolded at the University of Klagenfurt as 64 participants created 16 unique games during the intensive Klagenfurt GSE Jam, held December 13-15, 2024. The event, which welcomed in-person and online participants, challenged developers to create games around the theme “Final Countdown,” resulting in an impressive array of interpretations.

The event commenced with opening remarks from Wilfried Elmenreich and Felix Schniz, launching participants into 48 hours of intensive development. While anchored in the University’s Game Studies and Engineering master program, the jam welcomed developers of all backgrounds, creating a dynamic environment for creative collaboration. Organizers Armin Lippitz, Bodo Thausing, and Tom Tucek structured the event to maximize creative potential while maintaining a supportive atmosphere.

The diversity of submitted games demonstrated remarkable creativity, with developers crafting experiences ranging from intense action games to atmospheric adventures and narrative-driven experiences. Many teams embraced additional challenges known as diversifiers, including “Unconventional Controls,” “Minimalist Style,” and “Unusual Perspectives,” adding extra layers of complexity to their projects. The resulting games were evaluated across multiple categories, including Most Fun Game, Best Art, Best Audio, Best Writing, and Best Use of Theme, ensuring recognition for excellence across all aspects of game development.

Competition was fierce this year, with numerous standout titles demonstrating the participants’ ability to blend innovative gameplay mechanics with creative interpretations of the countdown theme. The event culminated in a game fair showcasing all sixteen titles, highlighting the remarkable achievements possible within a 48-hour development window.

All games from the Klagenfurt GSE Jam are available to play at https://itch.io/jam/klagenfurt-gse-jam-ws24/entries

Mathias Lux
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First Game Creators Barcamp Held at the University of Klagenfurt

Local game developers and researchers gathered for the inaugural Game Creators Barcamp on Friday, December 6th, at the University of Klagenfurt. The event featured discussions on game development, educational technologies, and industry funding opportunities.

The first Barcamp drew a small but engaged group of participants who explored various game design and development topics. Discussions covered diverse areas, including the story behind the game Electric Alps, potential improvements in language learning through gamification, particularly for teaching irregular German verbs, and an examination of game theory in puzzle game design. The attendees also provided an overview of funding schemes available for game studios. Plans are underway for the next Barcamp, scheduled for spring, hoping to increase participant numbers.